Pronominal possession in Faroese and the parameters of alienability/inalienability

The paper seeks to demonstrate that grammatically relevant distinctions of alienable vs. inalienable possessionare not completely uncommon in modern Indo-European languages of Europe. A detailed analysis of pronominal attributivepossession in presentday Faroese shows that there is a clearly defined system at work determined by semantic, syntactic, andpragmatic factors. The interplay of these factors is described on the basis of a corpus analysis of modern Faroese prose. It is arguedthat the presence or absence of the alienability-inalienability distinction in languages is not exclusively a structurally motivatedphenomenon as suggested by Nichols (1992). The authors claim that alienability/inalienability in grammar is, instead, semanti-cally motivated.