in (35b) than in (35a). It has been argued that the omission of de occurs only in kinship relationships, but phrasal constructions with a mandatory de encompasse other cases of inalienable possession, such as body parts. That contradicts the notion that inalienable possession is marked by less linguistic distance between the possessor and the possessee. Economic motivation (Nichols 1988) Nichols notes that frequently-possessed nouns, such as body parts and kinship terms, almost always occur with possessors, and alienable nouns occur less often with possessors. The following shows the frequency of possession between alienable and unalienable nouns in German. The table below shows the number of times that each noun occurred with or without a possessor in texts from the German Goethe-Corpus of the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The alienable nouns above are rarely possessed, but the inalienable kinship terms are frequently possessed. Consequently, inalienable nouns are expected to be possessed even if they lack a distinct possessive marker. Therefore, overt markings on inalienable nouns are redundant, and for economical syntactic construction, languages often have zero-marking for their inalienable nouns. That could be explained by Zipf's Law in which the familiarity or the frequency of an occurrence motivates the linguistic simplification of the concept. A listener who hears an inalienable noun can predict that it will be possessed, which eliminates the need for an overt possessor. Glossary of abbreviations Morpheme glosses Syntactic trees Other languages Austronesian languages Rapa Old Rapa is the indigenous language of Rapa Iti, an island of French Polynesia in the Bass Islands archipelago. The language structure of Rapa has two primary possessive particles: a and o. The usage of both particles is dependent on the relation between the possessor and the object. When words are categorized by possessive particles, there is a very close resemblance to the usage of the possessive particle and the object's alienability. However, the relation is better defined by William Wilson in his article Proto-Polynesian Possessive Marking. Briefly, through his two theories, the Simple Control Theory and Initial Control Theory, Wilson s contrast and thus better defines the usage of the possessive particles. The Simple Control Theory speculates that the determining factor directly correlated to the possessor's control over the object and emphasises a dominant vs. less-dominant relationship. Old Rapa adheres closer to the Initial Control Theory, which speculates that "the possessor's control over the initiation of the possessive relationship is