Talk:Possession (linguistics)

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It's not clear to me that the possessable/not possessable category is correct, or at least that it is different from inalienable/alienable. One doesn't possess a brother (for one thing), but more importantly one *does* possess the farm or land, although the *way* in which one expresses that possession is different. Can someone help me understand this better? Stevemarlett 18:15, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

I think it is simply a grammatical distinction between some nouns that can occur with genitive constructions and others that can. Apparently in Maasai one can grammatically own a brother but not land - simply because land cannot occur with a genitive construction. Inalienable/alienable is the opposite because inalienaby possessed nouns cannot occur without a genitive construction. Maunus 12:56, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

I would agree that it's a morphological distinction (not semantic--- therefore no "possessable vs. not possessable"--- and that it (appears to be) just the flip side of the same thing. So if it's the same, said in reverse, then it's odd to present it this way.... I think. Stevemarlett 13:26, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

I think it does make sense to distingish the two because a language may have a grammatical category of "inalienably possessed nouns" without having the reverse category of "unpossessable nouns". Maunus 15:24, 10 December 2006 (UTC)