Split Inalienable Coding in linguistic Wallacea: typology, origins, spread

Abstract This paper is a typological survey of inalienable possessive constructions in the linguistic area of Wallacea and its surrounds. In a sample of 189 Austronesian and non-Austronesian languages, 13 have a phenomenon not previously recognised in the theoretical or typological literature: Split Inalienable Coding (SIC), whereby a language has two or more possessive coding strategies that are closely or exclusively associated with expressing inalienable possession. This paper focusses on semantically conditioned splits, where minimally one strategy encodes the possession of body parts, and another the possession of kin terms. Geographically, all of the sampled languages with semantic SIC are located in Wallacea; special attention is therefore given to the development of split inalienables in this region. In most of these languages, SIC has developed very recently. I argue that there have been multiple causes of SIC: Austronesian languages are predisposed to develop SIC, due to the inheritance of a structurally defined class of kin terms that favours the distinction; and contact has also played a role in Northwest New Guinea, with SIC diffusing both across and within genealogical groupings.