Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

5.1 Inalienability and the historicity of the case-marking schemata
Since inalienability is the distinctive quality of the BNBV inal lexical class and the
morphosyntactic environment that defines it as a lexical class, not to mention the fact that
a number of morphosyntactic and semantic distinctions seem to be based on whether or
not the nominal component of a *bi-√ prefix compound verb is inalienable, the
typological literature on inalienability may be of some help in elucidating the diachronic
background to the BNBV inal construction in Sumerian. It seems fairly clear—at least
according to Nichols’ survey of inalienable possession in North America (1988)—that
the type of inalienability represented by the BNBV inal construction is among the most
common ways of marking inalienability. Nichols describes a similar case as follows:
… languages of the Caddoan and Iroquoian families systematically deprive kin terms
of the possibility of displaying an alienability opposition, in that those nouns
obligatorily take clausal rather than phrasal possession: one says, roughly, ‘she is
mother to me’ rather than ‘my mother’. Since the verb is the head of the clause and
hence dominates mother, these constructions amount to placement of the pronominal
marker of possession not on the head of the phrase but even higher, on the head of
the clause. The same can be said of constructions involving body-part terms, known
variously as the ethical dative, possessor ascension, etc. (Nichols 1988, 577-578).
Although “possessor raising,” which is the same thing as what Nichols calls “possessor
ascension” and describes in the foregoing paragraph, has been previously documented in
Sumerian (Zólyomi 1999, 231-237), I would submit that the kind of possessor raising
described by Zólyomi as an argument for the directive case hypothesis is better
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