Editing Inalienable possession (section)

===Requires fewer morphological features===
If a language has separate alienable and inalienable possession constructions, and one of the constructions is overtly marked and the other is "zero-marked", the marked form tends to be alienable possession. Inalienable possession is indicated by the absence of the overt marker.<ref name=Haspelmath>{{cite web|last1=Haspelmath|first1=Martin|title=Alienable vs. inalienable possessive constructions|url=http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/conference/08_springschool/pdf/course_materials/Haspelmath_Possessives.pdf|website=Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology|publisher=Leipzig Spring School on Linguistic Diversity|access-date=9 November 2014}}</ref> An example is the [[Inalienable possession#No overt possessive markers|data from Dâw]].

One typological study showed that in 78% of South American languages that distinguish between inalienable and alienable possession, inalienable possession was associated with fewer [[morphology (linguistics)|morphological]] markers than was its alienable counterpart. By contrast, only one of the surveyed languages required more [[morphology (linguistics)|morphological]] features to mark inalienable possession than alienable possession.<ref name="auto1"/> If a language makes a grammatical distinction between alienable and inalienable nouns, having an overt possessive marker to mark inalienability is redundant. After all, by being inalienable, a noun must be possessed.