(In)Alienable Possession in M andarin Relative Clauses (2022)

Abstract: Inalienable possession differs from alienable possession in that, in the former – e.g., kinships and part-whole relations – there is an intrinsic semantic dependency between the possessor and possessum. This paper reports two studies that used acceptability-judgment tasks to investigate whether native Mandarin speakers experienced different levels of interpretational costs while resolving different types of possessive relations, i.e., inalienable possessions (kinship terms and body parts) and alienable ones, expressed within relative clauses. The results show that sentences received higher acceptability ratings when body parts were the possessum as compared to sentences with alienable possessum, indicating that the inherent semantic dependency facilitates the resolution. However, inalienable kinship terms received the lowest acceptability ratings. We argue that this was because the kinship terms, which had the [+human] feature and appeared at the beginning of the experimental sentences, tended to be interpreted as the subject in shallow processing; these features contradicted the semantic-syntactic requirements of the experimental sentences.

## introduction possessive relations are fundamental in human languages because they associate nouns to express specific relationships. questions around the alienability between the possessor and the possessum in possessive relations has garnered considerable attention in linguistics @xcite . such alienability can be categorized in several ways. semantically, when a possessive relation is inalienable, there is an inherent dependency between the possessor and possessum, which does not exist in the case of alienable possessions @xcite . typical examples of inalienably possessed nouns include kinship terms and body parts; for example, mary's brother and mary's hand, respectively. the family relation and whole-part relation are often considered intrinsic and cannot be transferred. in contrast, an alienable possession, such as mary's desk, does not present such an inherent semantic dependency between the two nouns, and this type of possessive relation needs to be acquired, and can be transferred @xcite . several languages have distinct morphological markings of alienable and inalienable possessions @xcite @xcite , and various syntactic structures have been proposed for them @xcite . while mandarin does not make such distinctions through morphology, some syntactic and pragmatic distinctions between these two classes of possessions exist in it @xcite . normally, in mandarin, the possessor precedes the possessed noun, and they are linearly close to each other; for example, in laoban de gebo ('boss's arm'), laoban ('boss') is the possessor, and the next noun to appear, gebo ('arm'), is the possessum. however, in mandarin possessive relative clauses (prcs), as shown in (1), the possessum and possessor are not adjacent. prcs therefore provide us with a useful opportunity to examine the processing cost of resolving different types of possessions, because readers must resolve such a long-distance association to arrive at the possessive relationship between the two nouns. following a review on previous studies about possessive relations and possessive structures in mandarin (section 2), we present two experiments (section 3) in which an acceptability-judgment task (ajt) is used to measure the acceptability of mandarin prcs with three different types of possessums: alienable possessums, kinship terms, and body parts. our results partially support the hypothesis that the inherent semantic dependency of the inalienable possessions facilitate the integration of the possessor-possessum relations, reflected by the higher acceptability of the body parts as the possessum than the alienable noun as the possessum. however, the other inalienable condition, kinship terms as the possessum, received unexpected low ratings. section 4 briefly concludes this paper, and includes some possible explanations of its unexpected findings. ## alienable and inalienable possessions in mandarin while mandarin does not require overt morphological markings on (in)alienability, contrasts between alienable and inalienable possessions are reflected at the syntactic, semantic, and discourse levels @xcite . in this section, three examples are used to illustrate some of such differences: de omission, semantics in the ba-construction, and discourse-contextual demands. mandarin uses a particle, de, to link two nouns to form certain semantic associations, and possessive relation is one of them @xcite @xcite . example (2) is an alienable possessive phrase, and (3) is an inalienable one. when two nouns express a family relation and the possessor is a pronoun, the particle de can be omitted, e.g., (2). however, omitting the particle de may be ungrammatical if the relation is alienable and when the phrase is presented in isolation, as shown in (3). while kinship rela-tions seem to consistently allow the de omission and to enjoy a special status in possessive phrases in the literature, the above-mentioned contrast between (2) and (3) does not always hold. for example, when the inalienable possession is evaluated within context, as shown in example (4), the omission vs. non-omission of de does not influence its acceptability. the term alienability implies a property or entity that can be conveyed from one individual to another. putting alienable and inalienable possessions in the ba-construction, which often involves a meaning related to disposal, highlights these differences around transferring possession, as well as how such differences of (in)alienability affect sentence acceptability. in (5), the wallet originally belonged to zhangsan, establishing an alienable possessive relation, and after a giving event, the possession of the wallet is transferred to lisi. in contrast, inalienable possessive phrases exhibit more resistance to transferring possession via the baconstruction. for example, sentence (6) is grammatical, only in specific circumstances whereby zhangsan's sending of his brother to lisi makes sense. importantly, in this case, the kinship is not actually transferred; that is, the brother is still zhangsan's. body parts, on the other hand, cannot be accepted under normal conditions, leading to the unacceptability of (7). the effect of (in)alienability on sentence acceptability can also be observed at the discourse level. the semantic distinction between inalienable and alienable possessive nouns is that the former implies a specific possessor in the interlocutors' common ground, whereas the latter does not necessarily trigger such a possessive association, and can stand alone. for example, ( 8 ) is acceptable even though it is not specified whose plant it is. in contrast, ( 9 ) and ( 10 ) are less acceptable if the possessors are not indicated in the discourse. 2 (8) zhiwu plant bei pass taiyang sun shaisile。 burn-die-asp 'the plant was killed by the sun.' (9) ?sunnv granddaughter bei pass taiyang sun shaishangle。 burn-hurt-asp '(someone's) granddaughter was sunburnt.' (10) ?gebo arm bei pass taiyang sun shaishangle。 burn-hurt-asp '(someone's) arm was sun-burnt.' to summarize, inalienable and alienable possessions trigger different syntactic, semantic, and discourse requirements and these can affect the acceptability of sentences. nouns related to kinship terms and body parts often trigger a possessive dependency and increase contextual demands, whereas typical nouns allowing alienable possessions behave differently. the following section presents two ajt experiments using mandarin prcs to test the effects of (in)alienability on sentences' acceptability. 2 an anonymous reviewer pointed out that if sentence (9) is used in a conversation, it sounds acceptable because a rational/cooperative listener will assume the speaker to be the possessor. we agree with this observation, and with the same reviewer's observation that in future research, it would therefore be worthwhile to design dialogues with multiple agents expressing sentences like (8) to ( 10 ), and use them to investigate people's understandings of them. here, we originally intended to argue that sentences like ( 9 ) and ( 10 ) are less acceptable when no possessor can be associated with the subject. ## discussion and concluding remarks our study sought to explore whether different types of possessive relations affect the integration of long-distance dependency in mandarin relative clauses. this study supports the (in)alienablity effect in some respects. the fact that our participants gave their highest acceptability ratings to prcs with body parts as their possessed nouns suggests that inherent part-whole association facilitates the resolution of the possessor-possessum relations inside of relative clauses. in other words, when readers encounter a term for a body part, they expect to find a possessor in the sentence to fulfill the semantic dependency. thus, condition c of body parts being rated more acceptable than the inalienable condition a was consistent with our prediction, and supports the idea that inherent semantic association facilitates the resolution of long-distance dependency. when we consider subtypes of alienable possessive relationships, however, we found some unexpected results. given the operation of (in)alienability effects in the resolution of longdistance dependency, it would be reasonable to predict that kinship terms as the possessed nouns should also receive ratings higher than those in the alienable condition, just as we found with nouns in the condition of body parts. however, our results contradicted this prediction: condition b received the lowest ratings. this may be related to an essential characteristic of condition b: that both the possessor and possessum are humans, unlike in the other two conditions in which the possessum is inanimate. the same [+human] feature may interfere with the resolution of 'who did what to whom' in a relative clause that contains multiple animate references @xcite @xcite . moreover, kinship terms in our experimental items appear at the beginning of the clause, which tends to be regarded as the subject in shallow processing @xcite @xcite . coupled with the [+human] feature, the clause's initial position gives the kinship term great salience, but as the sentence unfolds, it turns out that it is possessed by the head noun and is not the subject of the sentence. this contradiction requires a proper reanalysis of thematic roles, resulting in a demand of additional processing demand, and therefore lower ratings of acceptability ratings. interview comments made by those experiment 2 participants who rated condition b as having low acceptability supported these views. as notably, our findings that the body-parts condition was rated the highest, then the alienable possessions, and then the kinships, are consistent with the frequency results of a corpus study on the mandarin passive construction with retained objects (pcro) @xcite . pcros with body parts, alienable possessions, and kinship terms as the retained objects are illustrated in (13-15): (13) ta he bei pass daduanle hit-broken-asp biliang. nose 'his nose was broken (by someone).' (14) ta he bei pass ren someone touzoule steel-away-asp qianbao. wallet 'his wallet was stolen by someone.' (15) ta she bei pass ren people qiangle rob-asp laogong. husband 'her husband was taken away from her by someone else.' in a pcro, the subject and the retained object formed a possessive relationship, and like the prc structure in our study, the possessor and possessum are not adjacent to each other. the results of corpus analyses @xcite show that body parts are the most common retained objects, accounting for 41.7% of all 422 instances, whereas typical nouns as the alienable possessums made up 29.8% of the data. although kinship terms are allowed in possessive phrases, there were only nine instances found in the corpus, making up 1.9% of the pcros found in the corpus. @xcite argued from a cognitive perspective that the possessive relationship needs to have inferential accessibility, and that retained objects should be included in the semantic framework of the subject. the animacy and the cognitive prominence of the kinship terms both make it difficult for them to be the objects of pcros. this idea echoes our suggestions that the [+human] feature and the clauseinitial position of kinship terms seem to increase prcs' processing loads. this leaves one to wonder if the (in)alienability effect would come into force for kinship terms if the [+human] feature were controlled in the alienable and inalienable conditions. lin (2007) developed a self-paced reading experiment using human nouns as the possessums for both the inalienable condition (16a) and the alienable condition (16b), and showed that the reading time for the head nouns of the inalienable condition (16a) was significantly faster than that for the alienable condition (16b). this finding supports the facilitation by inherent inalienable semantics. it is important to bear in mind that our findings were based on two ajt experiments. although people's explicit judgments can reflect the processing difficulties of sentences to some extent @xcite , it would be worthwhile in the future to use online methods, such as the self-paced reading paradigm and eye-tracking technology, to measure readers' reaction times and eye-gaze patterns when processing prcs. we also assumed that readers would search for a possessor when they found the inalienable possessum at the beginning of the sentence. that means a gap would be detected as long as readers encountered the first noun in the two inalienable conditions. several following-up questions could usefully be asked about this presumably detected gap. for instance, do readers start searching for potential fillers for this gap as soon as they detected it? would this gap results in a temporary slowdown in reading times, due to the unit being unresolved and needing to be held in mind? does early preparation for a filler-gap dependency facilitate the processing of the latter part of the sentence? because answering them will require finegrained and region-specific data, we leave these questions to our future research. to conclude, our results demonstrate the following effects of (in)alienability on sentence acceptability. first, semantically inherent wholepart relationships facilitate the resolution of the long-distance dependency between the possessor and possessum in prcs. second, the fact that the kinship terms, despite also forming alienable possessions, received the lowest acceptability ratings in both our ajt experiments suggests that the [+human] feature and/or the salient syntactic position led to considerable confusions when the readers only adopted shallow processing. previous research has found that when the possessed nouns are human nouns for both the inalienable and alienable conditions, the former has a processing advantage @xcite . thus, future studies could explore more types of possessive relationships in different syntactic structures, as well as using different experimental paradigms to test the (in)alienability effects on sentence comprehension and processing.