Universal 1594: body part /body parts > artefacts
- Original
- There will be no language in which the linguistic distance between possessor and possessum is greater for the terms in the left than it is for the terms on the right:
kinsmen/body parts > artefacts.
- Standardized
- The linguistic distance between possessor and possessum is never greater for the terms in the left than it is for the terms on the right:
kinsmen/body parts > artefacts.
- Keywords
- possession, alienable, inalienable, hierachy
- Domain
- inflection, syntax, semantics
- Type
- no genuine implication; rather: provided that
- Status
- achronic
- Quality
- absolute
- Basis
- languages mentioned in Haiman 1985, including Eskimo (Eskimo-Aleut), French, Spanish, Latin (all Romance, IE), Hungarian (Ugric), Diyari, Guugu-Yimidhirr, Kalkatungu , Pitta-Pitta, Walbiri, Yidin (all Pama-Nyungan), and others
- Source
- Haiman 1985: 135-6
- Counterexamples
0. Terms on the left are natural inalienable possessions, those on the right typical alienable possessions.1. In order to exclude the languages violating the hierarchy of alienability “body parts > kinsmen > artefacts” (see #1592), Haiman suggests this much cruder hierarchy. 2. Nichols (#1588), Haiman (this entry), Chappell & McGregor (1989: 26) place body parts and kin together as prototypical inalienables. By contrast, Seiler (1983: 13) suggests that the ranking might be of the order of kinship followed by body parts. On Tsunoda’s cline (#1592) body part is the highest. There are languages where spatial orientation terms appear alone at the top of the hierarchy as the most inalienable category. […] Hence, it appears that differences between languages as to which categories they treat as inanlienable may not be reconciled in terms of a universal hierarchy. (adapted from Chappell & McGregor 1995: 8)