In German, inalienable possessors are typically dative phrases (which holds both for locational and non-locational inalienable possession constructions). Although Dutch does not show morphological case distinctions, the same thing is arguably true for locational constructions such as (186a). In order to see this, consider the structurally similar example in (187a). That the possessor is not accusative but dative is clear from passive formation: example (187b) shows that in the regular passive, it is not the possessor Jan that gets promoted to subject, but the noun phrase de boeken'the books'; (187c) shows that in the so-called krijgen-passive the possessor is promoted to subject. This is sufficient to conclude that the possessor is an indirect object, and is hence assigned (abstract) dative case.

Note that example (187c) shows that inalienable possessors may function as subjects if they correspond to an “underlying” indirect object. We will discuss this more extensively in the next subsection.

The previous subsection has shown that a subject may function as inalienable possessor if it corresponds to an underlying indirect object. Now consider the examples in (188) with the verb geven'to give'. Example (188b) is excluded due to the fact that krijgen-passivization of the verb geven is impossible. Broekhuis & Cornips (1997) have claimed that this is due to the fact that the intended meaning can also be expressed by means of example (188b').

Perhaps one might argue that (188b') is derived from (188b) by elision of the semantically light participle gegeven'given'; see the next subsection for more evidence for the semantic lightness of geven'to give'. If so, we may conclude that this example is fully compatible with the claim that inalienable possessive subjects are “underlying” indirect objects.
      The dynamic verb krijgen has a more static counterpart, hebben, which also allows inalienable possessive subjects; cf. (189). We may account for this by assuming that the subjects in these examples are also “indirect” underlyingly. If this suggestion is on the right track, this may lead to the conclusion that, alongside the more familiar unaccusative verbs, there is a set of “undative” verbs that take a goal argument, but which are not able to assign dative case as a result of which the goal argument must be realized as a nominative subject. An argument in favor of this analysis is that verbs like hebben and krijgen cannot be passivized: this might be due to the fact that they do not have an agentive argument.

      If this analysis of the examples with krijgen and hebben is on the right track, we may expect there to be more undative verbs: good candidates are the verbs nemen'to take' and houden'to keep'; these verbs also seem to take subjects with a kind of goal role, show an aspectual difference like krijgen and hebben, and resist passivization.

Furthermore, the examples in (191) show that the subjects of these verbs may indeed function as inalienable possessors. However, there is a little snag: it seems that the passive counterparts of these examples are better than those in (190), which is also clear from the fact that they can readily be found on the internet. This means that we can only maintain our claim if we assume that the verb nemen with a PP-complementive is ambiguous between an agentive transitive and less agentive undative form. Perhaps this can be supported by the fact that the particle verb meenemen'take away' is clearly agentive and readily allows passivization. We will leave this issue for future research.

It is not expected that the direct object of a locational construction can act as an inalienable possessor given that it functions instead as the entity that is located with respect to the possessee: the direct object een hand in (192), for example, is the entity that is given a certain location with respect to the object of the locational PP.

Nevertheless, there is a class of verbs that systematically allow what seems to be their direct object to act as an inalienable possessor: the common denominator of these verbs is that they imply some form of bodily contact between the subject and the direct object of the clause; cf. Broekhuis et al. (1996). Some examples are given in (193) and (194); the (b)- and (c)-examples show that these examples allow regular passivization but not semi-passivization, which should be sufficient to show that we are dealing with a direct and not an indirect object in the (a)-examples.

Still, there are reasons to doubt the conclusion that we are dealing with direct objects in the (a)-examples of (193) and (194). First, it should be noted that the verbs that enter inalienable possession constructions like those in (193) and (194) are generally denominal and can be paraphrased by means of the light verb geven followed by an indefinite noun phrase. Some examples are given in (195); see Section 5.1.4.1, sub III, for a discussion of the semantic difference between the denominal and the light verb construction.

This implies that the examples in (193a) and (194a) are more or less equivalent to those in (196), in which the inalienable possessor does function as indirect object. Now if we assume that the semantically light verb geven has a phonetically empty counterpart that triggers so-called incorporation of the direct object, by which the denominal verbs in (195) are derived, we may maintain that the inalienable possessors in (193a) and (194a) actually have the same thematic role as the indirect objects in (196).

The suggested analysis for the problematic examples in (193a) and (194a) makes it possible to maintain the claim that inalienable possessors must be (underlying) goals. Of course, we still have to solve the problem that regular pasivization is possible, but semi-passivization is not. Broekhuis et al. (1996) claim that this is due to the fact that these examples are actually ambiguous between a structure with a dative and a structure with an accusative object; they substantiate this by referring to the German examples in (197), in which the possessor may appear either as a dative or an accusative DP.

This still does not solve the entire problem given that there does not seem to be any discernable meaning difference between the two alternatives. There may be several ways to solve this problem, but we will leave this to future research and refer the reader to Broekhuis et al. (1996: fn.3) for a suggestion.

The PPs in the locational constructions discussed above are predicative in the sense that they take an argument and assign it a location with respect to their complement, the possessee. This located argument is generally the direct object, but we have seen that it may also appear as the subject in regular passive constructions. The relevant example is repeated here as (198b).

Given that unaccusative verbs also involve a derived subject with the thematic role of theme, we expect that the subjects of these verbs may also function as inalienable possessors. The examples in (199) show that this prediction is indeed borne out.