Processing (In)alienable Possessions at the Syntax-Semantics Interface

1. Introduction Possessive relations are fundamental in linguistic descriptions. The alienability between a possessum and its possessor, in particular, has received much attention in the literature (see Antrim, 1996 and a recent collection by Coene & D'hulst, 2003, for reviews). The issue of alienability concerns whether a nominal entity holds an intrinsic relation with its possessor. Such a relationship can be relational (e.g. kinship terms such as mom and son) or part-whole (e.g. body parts such as face and palm). An alienable possessive relation, by contrast, depicts possessive relations between entities that are relatively independent in terms of their existence. Inalienable relations on nouns parallel the thematic relations of verbs and their arguments (Lin, 2006b). For a sentence to be complete, the crucial arguments of a verb need to be present. Likewise, an inalienable noun occurs with an identifiable possessor argument in the same sentence or discourse. In this paper, we focus on the argument requirements and syntactic realizations associated with inalienable nouns. We present syntactic properties associated with the argument representation of inalienable nouns, and provide experimental evidence on the processing of inalienable nouns (in comparison with the processing of alienable nouns). The goal is to show that the syntactic representation of inalienable nouns is responsible for syntactic alternations regarding alienability, and that the processing of (in)alienable possessive relations are distinguishable based on the syntactic and semantic properties of (in)alienability. In the following, Section 2 demonstrates the syntactic properties of inalienability in Mandarin Chinese. Section 3 presents experimental evidence on the processing of (in)alienable nouns in sentences, showing that the comprehension of (in)alienable nouns is consistent with the syntactic representations proposed. Section 4 concludes the paper.