Attributive Possession and the Contributions of Roots * Neil Myler myler@bu.edu Boston University DGfS 40 @ Universität Stuttgart March 8, 2018 1 Introduction: The Cross-Linguistic Alienable-Inalienable Generalization and the meaty roots hypothesis • A large amount of typological work (Ultan 1978; Seiler 1983; Haiman 1983; Nichols 1992; Heine 1997; Haspelmath 2008) points towards the following generalizations (see also Kar- vovskaya & Schoorlemmer 2017, p.291, who frame this somewhat differently): (1) Cross-Linguistic Alienable-Inalienable Generalization a. If there is a contrast between alienable and inalienable possession with respect to the presence of morphological structure, alienable possession is always more mor- phologically marked. b. Inalienable possession involves a tighter structural bond between possessee and pos- sessor. • The generalizations in (1) often manifest themselves in terms of inalienable possession re- quiring simple combination of the possessor and the possessee, whereas alienable possession requires some additional marker of the possession relation: (2) Inalienable Possession in Kampan Languages (Michael, 2012, his (16a)) No-gito 1sg-head ‘My head’ (3) Alienable Possession in Kampan Languages (based on Michael 2012, his (7)) No-biha-ne 1sg-bow-poss ‘My bow’ * I’d like to thank a former undergraduate student of mine, Lily Linke, for the term paper that put me on to Dayley (1985) and the data analyzed here, and Scott AnderBois for a discussion of the implications of Mayan data for the generalizations in (1). All errors are mine. 1