a strong typological pattern for inalienable possession to require fewer morphological markers than alienable possession constructions. Inalienable possession constructions involve two nouns or nominals: the possessor and the possessee. Together, they form a unit, the determiner phrase (DP), in which the possessor nominal may occur either before the possessee (prenominal) or after its possessee (postnominal), depending on the language. French, for example, can use a postnominal possessor (the possessor (of) Jean occurs after the possessee the arm): {| !(2) !a. !French: inalienable body-part noun = postnominal possessor |- | | | (Guéron 2007: 590 (la)) |- ! !b. !French: inalienable kin noun = postnominal possessor |- | | | |- ! !c. !French: alienable noun = postnominal possessor |- | | | |} In contrast, English generally uses a prenominal possessor (Johns brother). However, in some situations, it may also use a postnominal possessor, as in the brother of John. Morphological markers No overt possessive markers The South American language Dâw uses a special possessive morpheme (bold in the examples below) to indicate alienable possession. The possessive morpheme ɛ̃̀ɟ in examples (3a) and (3b) indicates an alienable relationship between the possessor and the possessee. {| |- !(3) !a. !Alienable |- | | | |- ! !b. |- | | | (Martins 2004: 546) |} The possessive marker does not occur in inalienable possession constructions. Thus, the absence of ɛ̃̀ɟ, as in example (4), indicates that the relationship between the possessor and the possessee is inalienable possession. Identical possessor deletion Igbo, a West African language, the possessor is deleted in a sentence if both its subject and the possessor of an inalienable noun refer to the same entity. In (5a), both referents are the same, but it is ungrammatical to keep both of them in a sentence. Igbo uses the processes of identical possessor deletion, and the yá (his), is dropped, as in the grammatical (5b). A similar process occurs in some Slavic languages, notably Serbian: Word order Possessor switch The distinction between alienable and inalienable possession constructions may be marked by a difference in word order. Igbo uses another syntactic process when the subject and the possessor refer to different entities. In possessor switch, the possessor of the inalienable noun is placed as close as possible to the verb. In the following examples, the possessor yá is not deleted because both referents are different: In the ungrammatical (8a), the verb