Beyond alienability: factors determining possessive classes in Piaroa

Abstract This article focuses on possession marking in Piaroa, a Jodï-Sáliban language spoken along the Middle Orinoco River on the Venezuelan-Colombian border. Based on a corpus of first-hand fieldwork data and building on previous descriptions of Piaroa possession, I show that Piaroa nouns can be divided into four main possessive noun classes based not only on the alienability (i.e., obligatorily possessed vs. optionally possessed) contrast but also based on construction types (i.e., directly possessed vs. indirectly possessed). This article thus contributes to our crosslinguistic understanding of possession constructions and possessive noun classes by showing that alienability is not a sufficient criterion to account for the different possessive classes and splits in Piaroa adnominal possessive constructions, which require positing two concurrent but distinct systems of possessive classification.