Alienability

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The inalienable possession (of English alienable , salable ' ) is a in many languages common distinction between veräußerbarem (alienablem or not organic possessivem) and inalienable (inalienablem or organic possessivem) possession.

The possessed object is called the possessum (from Latin possideo, possido , to possess, to take possession of ” ), the owner is called the possessor . Possession is possession . Inalienabel are mostly body parts, spatial parts and relatives. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl introduced this distinction. Hansjakob Seiler describes the inalienable relationship as relational .

Ownership display outside of a nominal group

Many Indo-European languages have the ability to indicate the inalienability of objects through external possessors. The German expresses the inalienability through a dative object . External objects, on the other hand, are expressed “internally” within a nominal group through a genitive or a demonstrative pronoun. The disadvantage of this concept is that it is not possible to describe the alienability of sentences without indirect object completion.

Examples of external possessors:

  • “Hans cut his hair.” → The hair is inalienable as part of his body.
  • “He blows the child 's nose.” → As a part of the body, the nose is inalienable.
  • Inadmissible would be: "Hans cut his hair ." Or "He is blowing the child's nose ."

Examples of internal possessors:

  • “He cleans the windows of his house .” → A window is external as a thing.

It would therefore be wrong to appoint an external possessor: "He cleans the house 's windows."

Celtic languages , but also English , do not recognize this semantic distinction. In English, possession must always be described within a noun group using a demonstrative pronoun or a genitive or a prepositional construction.

Examples:

  • "Hans cuts his hair." It would be wrong: "Hans cuts him the hair."
  • "He has cleaned the windows of his house ." It would not be correct: "He has cleaned the house the windows."

The loss of the external possessor in the Celtic languages ​​is possibly due to a Semitic substratum (→  Atlantean Semitiden ), which could be traced back to the influence of the Phoenicians . The Celtic superstrat , for its part, became the substratum of Anglo-Saxon through the Germanization of the British Isles by the Saxons, Jutes and Angles, whereby the loss of the external possessor was inherited in English. However, in current British English there is a tendency to express the alienability of a possessum through the contrast of have got (contrasted with inalienable possessums as objects of have ).

A description of the alienability is not possible for sentences without indirect object completion:

Examples:

  • "He only has one arm." (Inalienabel)
  • "He only has one car." (Alienabel)

Ownership display within a nominal group

The Mande languages distinguish e.g. B. Within a nominal group external and inalienable property syntactically by setting the property-indicating word ká .

  • alienabel: ní ká só ("my house")
  • inalienabel: ní fà ("my father")

The standard Chinese uses the particle de的for ownership . In the case of unalienable possession, it is usually omitted or is optional, while it is mandatory in the case of alienable possession:

  • alienabel: wǒ de fángzi我 的 房子 ("my house")
  • inalienabel: wǒ fùqīn我 父亲 ("my father")

European languages ​​do not know the type of distinction by means of possessive expressions indicating possession within a noun group. Therefore, “my picture” can be used both in the sense of “I own a picture” (alienabel) and in the sense of “I have painted a picture” (inalienable).

The advantage of possessive expressions indicating the type of possession within a nominal group is that the externality can also be made recognizable in sentences without indirect object completion . In German, possessive verbs such as “haben” or “belong” denote a relationship of possession and can mean both the organic possessive variant and the non-organic possessive opposite. In German, the possessive relation remains syntactically unexpressed and must be developed semantically:

  • "Maria owns a boat." - "Peter has a cupboard." (Alienabel)
  • "Magda has a son." - "Karl has a stomach ulcer." - "Heike has brown eyes." (Inalienabel)
  • "Ladies and gentlemen." - "I know your brother." - "The neighbour's grandchildren." - "My belly is mine!" (Inalienable)

Ownership display through subject duplication

In some Asian languages, the inalienability of possession is expressed by a doubling of the subject, that the inalienable object is syntactically represented as a subject. This applies e.g. B. for the Chinese languages , the Japanese languages and the Korean language .

Example:

  • German: " His head hurts."
  • Chinese: " His head hurts." (Ta tóu téng.)

literature

  • Bernd Heine: Possession. Cognitive sources, forces, and grammaticalization . 1997.
  • Hansjakob Seiler : Possession as an Operational Domain of Language . 1983.
  • H. Chappell and W. McGregor: The Grammar of Inalienability . Berlin 1995.
  • Helmut Glück (Ed.): Metzler Lexicon Language . 2000.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sali Tagliamonte: Every place has a different toll . In: Determinants of Grammatical Variation in English . Rohdenburg & Mondorf. De Gruyter 2003. Also Martiny 2016.
  2. ↑ C.-T. James Huang: Logical Relations in Chinese and the Theory of Grammar . Taylor & Francis, 1998, ISBN 0-8153-3136-3 , pp. 66, 247, 366.
    Gregor Kneussel: Grammar of Modern Chinese . 2nd Edition. Foreign Language Literature Publishing House, Beijing 2007, ISBN 978-7-119-04262-6 , p. 41.