1 Syntax of the World's Languages 2, University of Lancaster, 14-17 September 2006 Explaining alienability contrasts in adnominal possession: economy vs. iconicity MARTIN HASPELMATH Max-Planck-Institut für evolutionäre Anthropologie 1. The main claim of this talk The universals of form-function relationship in alienability contrasts should not be explained in terms of iconic motivation, as in Haiman's (1983) influential paper, but by economic motivation and the frequency of occurrence in possessed constructions. e.g. (1) Abun (West Papuan) (Berry & Berry 1999:77-82) a. alienable possession b. inalienable possession ji bi nggwe ji syim I of garden I arm 'my garden' 'my arm' Haiman 1983: For 'arm', a juxtaposition construction is chosen, with little "linguistic distance" between possessor and possessum. This iconically reflects the greater conceptual closeness of possessor and possessum (arms are not conceived of independently of their owners). By contrast, 'my garden' shows an overt marker bi between the possessor and the possessum, implying greater linguistic distance. This reflects the greater conceptual distance between 'garden' and 'I'. My story: Nouns like 'arm' normally, or at least very frequently, occur as possessums in possessive NPs, whereas for nouns like 'garden', this is much less frequent: We often talk about gardens without mentioning or even thinking about their possessors. This means that the overt expression of the possessive relation is expected anyway. Abun exploits this redundancy and uses an overt possessive marker only with nouns like 'garden', while body-part terms occur in a more economical markerless construction. 2. Definition of key concepts possessive relation = relation of ownership (e.g. 'my garden'), part-whole (e.g. 'my arm'), or kinship (e.g. 'my father') (similar constructions are also often used for other relations, e.g. 'my school', 'my report', but these are harder to compare cross-linguistically) adnominal possessive relation = relation in which the possessor is the head of a noun phrase and the possessum is a modifier, e.g. 'my book', 'Aisha's head' but not: Pedro hit me on the head. (='hit my head') (external possession) La mère lui a lavé les cheveux. 'Mother washed his hair.' ('to-him the hair') possessive split =