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Inalienable possession
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{{Short description|Grammatical category}} {{about|a linguistic category|the property category|Inalienable possessions}} {{Linguistics}} In [[linguistics]], '''inalienable possession'''<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/conference/08_springschool/pdf/course_materials/Haspelmath_Possessives.pdf |title=Haspelmath Possessives |website=www.eva.mpg.de}}</ref> ([[list of glossing abbreviations|abbreviated]] '''{{sc|inal}}''') is a type of [[possession (linguistics)|possession]] in which a [[noun]] is [[Obligatory possession|obligatorily possessed]] by its possessor. Nouns or [[nominal (linguistics)|nominal affixes]] in an inalienable possession relationship cannot exist independently or be "alienated" from their possessor.<ref name="ling dictionary">{{cite book|last1=Matthews|first1=P. H.|title=Inalienable possession|publisher=Oxford University Press|doi=10.1093/acref/9780199202720.001.0001|year=2007|isbn=9780199202720}}</ref> Inalienable nouns include body parts (such as ''leg'', which is necessarily "someone's leg" even if it is severed from the body), [[Kinship terminology|kinship terms]] (such as ''mother''), and part-whole relations (such as ''top'').<ref name="auto">{{cite journal|last1=Lichtenberk|first1=Frantisek|last2=Vaid|first2=Jyotsna|last3=Chen|first3=Hsin-Chin|title=On the interpretation of alienable vs. inalienable possession: A psycholinguistic investigation|journal=Cognitive Linguistics|date=2011|volume=22|issue=4|pages=659–689|doi=10.1515/cogl.2011.025|s2cid=143993134|url=https://philarchive.org/rec/LICOTI |id={{ProQuest|919350399}}}}</ref> Many languages reflect the distinction but vary in how they mark inalienable possession.<ref name=Nichols/> Cross-linguistically, inalienability correlates with many [[morphology (linguistics)|morphological]], [[syntactic]], and [[semantic]] properties. In general, the alienable–inalienable distinction is an example of a binary possessive [[noun class|class system]] in which a language distinguishes two kinds of possession (alienable and inalienable). The alienability distinction is the most common kind of binary possessive class system, but it is not the only one.<ref name = Nichols>{{cite web | url = http://wals.info/feature/description/59 | title = Possessive Classification | work = [[World Atlas of Language Structures]] |author1=Nichols, Johanna |author2=Bickel, Balthasar | access-date = 2011-02-26 }}</ref> Some languages have more than two possessive classes. In [[Papua New Guinea]], for example, [[Anêm language|Anêm]] has at least 20 classes, and [[Amele language|Amele]] has 32.<ref>{{Cite journal | url=http://wals.info/chapter/59 | title=Possessive Classification| journal=The World Atlas of Language Structures Online| year=2013| last1=Nichols| first1=Johanna| last2=Bickel| first2=Balthasar| editor1=Dryer, Matthew S| editor2=Haspelmath, Martin}}</ref><ref name = Nichols/> Statistically, 15–20% of the world's languages have [[obligatory possession]].<ref name= Nichols3>{{cite web | url = http://wals.info/feature/58 | title = Feature/Obligatory Possessive Inflection | work = [[World Atlas of Language Structures]] |author1=Nichols, Johanna |author2=Bickel, Balthasar | access-date = 2011-03-06 }}</ref>
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