Inalienable possession

In linguistics, inalienable possession is a type of possession in which a noun is obligatorily possessed by its possessor. Nouns or nominal affixes in an inalienable possession relationship cannot exist independently or be "alienated" from their possessor. For example, a hand implies "(someone's) hand", even if it is severed from the whole body. Likewise, a father implies "(someone's) father". Inalienable nouns include body parts (e.g. leg, which is necessarily "someone's leg"), kinship terms (e.g. mother), and part-whole relations (e.g. top). Many languages reflect this distinction, but they vary in the way they mark inalienable possession. Cross-linguistically, inalienability correlates with many morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties.