Let’s give hands – and arrows: (in)alienable possession in Amazonian languages and beyond

This talk introduces the notion of inalienable possession – an area where human cognition and grammar intertwine – and looks at inalienability phenomena in Harakmbut, an endangered isolate language spoken in the Peruvian Amazon. One of these phenomena include bound nouns, or obligatorily possessed nouns, which are ubiquitous in indigenous South American languages. The talk also surveys inalienability phenomena from different languages in other areas of grammar, and presents the goals of this research stay within language description and typology, as well as psycholinguistics.