Topicality, affectedness, and body-part grammar

Abstract

AbstractPerhaps the most common distinction expressed in body-part grammar is alienability: possession of body parts and some other entities is often indicated with one grammatical construction, while possession of other objects is indicated with another. Because of this pervasiveness, it can be tempting to assume that if there are two different constructions involving body parts in a language, the difference will be alienability. Things can be more interesting, however, in ways both subtle and far-reaching. A closer look at the forms and usages of body-part terms in some unrelated languages indigenous to North America shows that what might at first appear to be possessive constructions, sometimes called ‘external possession’, actually convey distinctions of topicality and affectedness instead. Furthermore, the bases underlying such constructions can affect the shapes of neighboring languages.