Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

work of Nichols who describes the diachronic origin of inalienability as follows (Nichols
1988, 579):
A single diachronic process appears to motivate all of the attested patterns involving
‘[in]alienability’: tighter bonding of possessive affixes, fusion of possessive affixes
to nouns, and earlier lexicalization of possession, take place with those nouns which
are most often possessed—kin terms, body parts, and (in languages where they are
lexicalized as nouns) inherently relational notions such as parts of wholes.
Landau’s argument ultimately boils down to a purely structural argument about the
location of inalienable as apposed to alienable nouns in certain positions within syntactic
trees and he explains the grammaticality of (27) on the basis of the idiomatic character of
inalienable nouns and the fact that inalienable possessors are more tightly bound to an
inalienable noun than is the case with alienable nouns. But it turns out that Landau’s
hypothesis is wrong: as noted by Pylkkänen (2002, 48), there are cases in which an
alienable noun can occur as the perceived object with the verb ra’a “to see” and the
criterion appears to have nothing to do with inalienability and everything to do with the
privative semantics associated with low source applicatives; Pylkkänen describes the
criterion as follows (Pylkkänen 2002, 48):
Landau notes that the acceptability of the construction increases with intimate body
parts and decreases with neutral ones. In other words, the semantic restrictions
parallel the Finnish [low source applicative] ones precisely: the possessor dative is
only acceptable with ‘see’ when the seeing-event makes something public that was
private before. And, contrary to Landau’s generalization, the object that becomes
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