Inalienable possession

Grammatical category

In linguistics, inalienable possession is a type of possession in which a noun is obligatorily possessed by its possessor. Nouns or nominal affixes in an inalienable possession relationship cannot exist independently or be "alienated" from their possessor. Inalienable nouns include body parts, kinship terms, and part-whole relations. Many languages reflect the distinction but vary in how they mark inalienable possession. Cross-linguistically, inalienability correlates with many morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties.

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