Editing Inalienable possession (section)

====Economic motivation (Nichols 1988)====
Nichols notes that frequently-possessed nouns, such as body parts and kinship terms, almost always occur with possessors, and alienable nouns occur less often with possessors.<ref name="Walter de Gruyter & Co"/><ref name=Good>{{cite book|editor-last1=Good|editor-first1=Jeff|title=Linguistic Universals and Language Change|date=2008|publisher=Oxford University Press|location=New York|page=197}}</ref>

The following shows the frequency of possession between alienable and unalienable nouns in [[German language|German]].<ref name=Good/> The table below shows the number of times that each noun occurred with or without a possessor in texts from the German Goethe-Corpus of the works of [[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]].
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Noun category !! Noun !! Unpossessed !! Possessed
|-
| Alienable || ''Gärtner''   'gardener' <br> ''Jäger''   'hunter' <br> ''Pfarrer''   'priest' || 24 <br> 48 <br> 12  || 0 <br> 2 <br> 0
|-
| Inalienable || ''Schwester''   'sister' <br> ''Tante''   'aunt' <br> ''Tochter''   'daughter' || 32 <br> 47 <br> 46 || 58 <br> 22 <br> 53
|}

The alienable nouns above are rarely possessed, but the inalienable kinship terms are frequently possessed.<ref name=Good/> Consequently, inalienable nouns are expected to be possessed even if they lack a distinct possessive marker. Therefore, overt markings on inalienable nouns are redundant, and for economical syntactic construction, languages often have zero-marking for their inalienable nouns.<ref name="Walter de Gruyter & Co"/>

That could be explained by [[Zipf's Law]] in which the familiarity or the frequency of an occurrence motivates the linguistic simplification of the concept.<ref name=Haiman /> A listener who hears an inalienable noun can predict that it will be possessed, which eliminates the need for an overt possessor.<ref name=Haspelmath/>