Body ownership and beyond: Connections between cognitive neuroscience and linguistic typology

Consciousness and Cognition 26 (2014) 189–196

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Review

Body ownership and beyond: Connections between cognitive neuroscience and linguistic typology David Kemmerer ⇑ Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Purdue University, United States Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, United States

a r t i c l e

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Article history: Received 12 January 2014 Available online 20 April 2014 Keywords: Body ownership Rubber hand illusion Full body illusion Possession Self Somatoparaphrenia Inalienability Semantics Grammar Linguistic typology

a b s t r a c t During the past few decades, two disciplines that rarely come together—namely, cognitive neuroscience and linguistic typology—have been generating remarkably similar results regarding the representational domain of personal possessions. Research in cognitive neuroscience indicates that although the core self is grounded in body ownership, the extended self encompasses a variety of noncorporeal possessions, especially those that play a key role in defining one’s identity. And research in linguistic typology indicates that many languages around the world contain a distinct grammatical construction for encoding what is commonly called ‘‘inalienable’’ possession—a category of owned objects that almost always includes body parts, but that also tends to include several other kinds of personally relevant entities. Both of these independent lines of investigation are summarized, and a number of interdisciplinary connections between them are discussed. Ó 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Contents 1. 2. 3. 4.

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cognitive neuroscience and the continuum between the core Linguistic typology and the semantics of the personal sphere Exploring the interdisciplinary connections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1. Introduction It is well-established that many aspects of consciousness, cognition, and culture are reflected in the way we talk (e.g., Enfield, 2002; Jackendoff, 2007; Malt & Wolff, 2010; Pinker, 2007). But so far only a few studies have demonstrated in detail how, for particular representational domains, mutually informative interdisciplinary connections can be made between, on the one hand, cognitive neuroscience, which investigates the neural implementation of all forms of psychological

⇑ Address: Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, 500 Oval Drive, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907-2038, United States. Fax: +1 765 494 0771. E-mail address: [email protected] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2014.03.009 1053-8100/Ó 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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phenomena, and on the other hand, linguistic typology, which investigates similarities and differences among the roughly 6000 languages in the world (e.g., Bornkessel-Schlesewsky & Schlesewsky, 2013; Giraud et al., 2007; Kemmerer, 2006, 2012). The purpose of this paper is to pursue precisely this kind of cross-field integration, specifically by showing that, during the past few decades, cognitive neuroscience and linguistic typology have been developing, in their own separate ways, closely related treatments of a mental domain that is fundamental to human identity, namely personal possessions, with special reference to body parts and certain noncorporeal classes of entities. Back in the late 19th century, William James (1890) made some seminal observations about the nature of the self, noting that even though one’s identity is clearly centered in one’s body, it extends beyond the boundaries of the skin to incorporate many other possessions, including those that one is frequently in physical contact with (e.g., clothing, jewelry, sentimental objects, etc.) and those that one is tightly bound to in other ways (e.g., family members, reputation, creative accomplishments, etc.). As James (1890, pp. 291–2) put it, ‘‘a man’s Self is the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and yacht and bank-account. All these things give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down—not necessarily in the same degree for each thing, but in much the same way for all.’’ It has already been shown that these ideas are highly relevant to behavioral economics and several branches of psychology (Belk, 1988; Belk, 1991; see also Jarrett, 2013). Here the goal is to show that they also underlie some striking parallels between cognitive neuroscience and linguistic typology. The first section reviews recent research in cognitive neuroscience which indicates that, in keeping with James’s original insights, there seems to be a continuum between the core self, which depends on body ownership, and the extended self, which encompasses extracorporeal possessions, especially privileged ones. The next section then reviews recent research in linguistic typology which indicates that in many languages around the world, a distinct grammatical construction is used to encode what is generally referred to as ‘‘inalienable’’ possession. Although the scope of this conceptual category varies across cultures, it is usually restricted to certain subsets of entities that fall along the aforementioned continuum between the core self and the extended self, most notably body parts, family members, mental traits/states, and objects that are conventionally considered to be integral to one’s identity. Finally, the last section discusses some of the implications of these intriguing correspondences between cognitive neuroscience and linguistic typology. 2. Cognitive neuroscience and the continuum between the core self and the extended self Recent theoretical and empirical work has led to the view that the experience of ‘‘being someone’’—that is, of having a core self—requires, at a minimum, the following features: identification with a body; spatiotemporal self-location within that body; and a first-person perspective from that body, typically anchored behind the eyes (Blanke & Metzinger, 2009). The main focus here is on the first feature, which is usually called body ownership. The precise nature of body ownership remains mysterious, but the dominant hypothesis is that it depends on multisensory integration operating in the context of a stored predictive model of the body schema (Apps & Tsakiris, 2014; Blanke, 2012; Ehrsson, 2012; Tsakiris, 2010). For example, when one moves through the world, one receives tightly correlated visual and proprioceptive signals about the dynamically changing positions of one’s body parts. Similarly, when one sees something contact the surface of one’s body, one receives tightly correlated visual and tactile signals about the location on the skin where the contact occurred. Such multisensory afferents converge in high-level cortical regions where they are integrated to form a continuously updated representation of one’s body in space. In conjunction with the sense of agency and a lifelong background of egocentrically framed corporeal experience, these sorts of close associations among multiple perceptual inputs are interpreted as self-specifying and hence give rise to body ownership—the feeling that this particular body is ‘‘mine.’’ Some of the most compelling evidence for this hypothesis comes from a number of studies in which striking body illusions are induced by means of intersensory conflict. For example, in the classic ‘‘rubber hand illusion’’ (Botvinick & Cohen, 1998), brush strokes are applied synchronously and repeatedly to the participant’s real hand, which is hidden from view, and to a life-sized realistic rubber hand, which is in full view. After a short period (about 10–30 s), most participants (about 70%) begin to experience some strange sensations. Not only do they feel the strokes at the location of the rubber hand rather than the real hand, but they feel as if the rubber hand has become their own. This remarkable illusion is triggered by an overriding of proprioceptive signals by visual information—a process which reveals that the representation of body ownership is not rigid but instead quite plastic, being easily modifiable by simple experimental manipulation. Moreover, the occurrence of the illusion has been confirmed not only by subjective reports, but also by a variety of objective measures, including proprioceptive drift (when participants are asked to close their eyes and point to the location of their real hand, their errors are toward the location of the rubber hand), simulated injury (when the rubber hand is threatened with a sharp instrument, skin conductance responses are elevated), and temperature drop (the real hand cools by up to 0.27 °C, and the amount of change correlates with the strength of the illusion). The illusion does not work, however, if the brush strokes are asynchronous, if the rubber hand is too far away, or if a noncorporeal object, like a wooden block, is substituted for the rubber hand. For a review of these findings see Ehrsson (2012), and for other relevant results see Tsakiris, Tajadura-Jimenez, and Costantini (2011), Maister, Sebanz, Knoblich, and Tsakiris (2013), and Moguillansky, O’Regan, and Petitmengin (2013). Additional evidence for the integration hypothesis comes from full body illusions, many of which employ a set-up in which the participant receives tactile stimulation on part of their real body (e.g., the abdomen) while simultaneously seeing,

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through head-mounted goggles, such stimulation being applied to the corresponding part of another individual, as viewed from that individual’s perspective. By using such an experimental design to temporarily alter the participant’s multisensory processing, it is possible to induce out-of-body experiences (Ehrsson, 2007; Guterstam & Ehrsson, 2012) and to elicit selfidentification with another real person (Petkova & Ehrsson, 2008) or with a mannequin that is very small, moderately small, adult-sized, or gigantic (Banakou, Groten, & Slater, 2013; Petkova & Ehrsson, 2008; van der Hoort, Guterstam, & Ehrsson, 2011). Such studies provide especially dramatic demonstrations of the multisensory basis, as well as the flexibility, of body ownership. The neural correlates of the rubber hand illusion have been investigated with positron emission tomography (PET; Tsakiris, Hesse, Boy, Haggard, & Fink, 2007), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI; Ehrsson, Holmes, & Passingham, 2005; Ehrsson, Spence, & Passingham, 2004; Ehrsson, Weich, Weiskopf, Dolan, & Passingham, 2007), and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS; Kammers et al., 2009; Tsakiris, Costantini, & Haggard, 2008). Furthermore, the neural correlates of two types of full body illusions have been investigated with fMRI (Ionta et al., 2011; Petkova et al., 2011). Overall, these studies suggest that body ownership is subserved by a bilateral network of brain regions that includes the posterior parietal cortex, the ventral premotor cortex, the insula, and perhaps also the temporoparietal junction (Serino et al., 2013; for further information about the role of the insula in interoceptive aspects of the core self, see Damasio, 2010, pp. 205–209). A limitation of these studies, however, is that although they help to illuminate how the brain generates the illusory feeling that one possesses either a rubber hand or a completely different body, they do not shed any direct light on how the brain generates the genuine feeling that one possesses one’s own body. Deeper insight into the cognitive and neurobiological aspects of body ownership comes from research on somatoparaphrenia, a neurological disorder in which the patient denies ownership of a limb that is not only paralyzed but almost always defective with regard to proprioceptive and somatosensory signals (see Vallar & Ronchi, 2009, for a review of 51 cases). For example, part of an interview with one patient proceeded as follows (E = examiner, P = patient; Cogliano, Crisci, Conson, Grossi, & Trojano, 2012, p. 765): E: Can you touch your left hand with your right one, please? P: Done. I’m touching it. (He pointed at the space contiguous to his left elbow, miming a grasping gesture.) E: Now, please touch your left shoulder with your right hand and then move it along your arm downwards till you catch your left hand. P: Yes, I have reached it, but this is not my hand, it is not mine, my hand is close to it. E: So, whose hand is that? P: I don’t know, but it is a dead hand. E: Can you name all your left fingers as you touch them, please? (He performs the task well.) P: But they are not mine. E: Well, whose fingers can they possibly be? P: I don’t really know. E: Look at this hand (patient’s left hand), very carefully; whose hand could it be? P: I don’t know. Maybe it is mine. But no, I’m sure, it isn’t mine, I don’t feel it as my hand. Somatoparaphrenia is generally attributed to a disturbance of multisensory integration (Vallar & Ronchi, 2009), but it may be due more specifically to an impairment of the process of mapping bodily signals from different sources and frames of reference onto a single, stored, first-person model in egocentric coordinates (Fotopoulou et al., 2011; Jenkinson, Haggard, Ferreira, & Fotopoulou, 2013). In keeping with these accounts, patients with somatoparaphrenia tend to have righthemisphere strokes affecting the following regions: a lateral fronto-temporo-parietal network that contributes to spatial representation, attention, and action; the insula, which, as mentioned above, plays a key role in interoception; and the medial prefrontal cortex, which underlies self-referential processing and reward evaluation (Baier & Karnath, 2008; Feinberg, Venneri, Simone, Fan, & Northoff, 2010; Gandola et al., 2012). It is also noteworthy that a psychologically similar disorder—namely, the feeling that one’s limb has become alien—can result from peripheral nerve damage in the limb itself (Sacks, 1993). And a recent fMRI study with healthy participants showed not only that an illusion of limb disownership can be induced through 3D video technology, but that the intensity of the illusion matches the degree to which neural activity is reduced in multisensory regions of both hemispheres (Gentile, Guterstam, Brozzoli, & Ehrsson, 2013). Taken together, these advances in cognitive neuroscience illustrate some of the ways in which, at both the phenomenal level of everyday experience and the biological level of brain organization, body ownership is a special kind of possession that constitutes an essential component of the core self. As indicated below, however, there is also mounting evidence that several other kinds of possessions are mentally construed as key elements of the extended self. While reflecting on the nature of personal identity, James (1890, p. 291) observed that ‘‘between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves. Our fame, our children, the work of our hands, may be as dear to us as our bodies are, and arouse the same feelings and the same acts of reprisal if attacked.’’ The notion that we often treat individuals who belong to our intimate circle of family and friends as extensions of ourselves has been supported by several fMRI studies. For example, Abraham and von Cramon (2009) found that the medial prefrontal cortex—which, as mentioned above, is associated with self-referential thinking (Murray, Schaer, & Debbané, 2012)—is

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engaged significantly more when participants make judgments about family and friends than when they make comparable judgments about famous celebrities. A number of other recent experiments have yielded analogous results, bolstering the view that activity in the medial prefrontal cortex carries important information about the personal relevance of other individuals (Krienen, Tu, & Buckner, 2010; Moore, Merchant, Kahn, & Pfeifer, 2014; Wang et al., 2012; Zhu, Zhang, Fan, & Han, 2007; see also Abraham, 2013). As James (1890) noted, people also tend to treat certain privileged inanimate possessions as extensions of themselves. It is well-known, for instance, that a large proportion of children become inseparable from comfort objects like stuffed animals and blankets at an early age. In an experimental investigation of this phenomenon, Hood and Bloom (2008) showed that when young children are presented with an object that is perceptually identical to a favorite toy, they strongly prefer to keep the original toy than accept the replacement. Similarly, the idea that ‘‘we are what we own’’ is widely manifested in adults by their proclivity to identify with their most precious material possessions, such as their house or car. This is why people often interpret burglaries and vandalism as assaults on their very selves, and it is why the law-enforcement practice of taking away a prisoner’s wallet, jewelry, and clothes reduces their sense of personal identity. These aspects of the extended self have been explored in numerous studies which have shown that, compared to unowned objects, owned objects are attended, remembered, and valued more strongly, even when the experience of possession is only imaginary or very brief (e.g., Beggan, 1992; Belk, 1988, 1991; Cunningham, Turk, Macdonald, & Macrae, 2008; Gray, Ambady, Lowenthal, & Deldin, 2004; Shi, Zhou, Han, & Liu, 2011; Turk, van Bussel, Brebner, et al., 2011; van den Bos, Cunningham, Conway, & Turk, 2010). For example, in one of the first demonstrations of the classic ‘‘endowment effect,’’ Knetsch (1989) presented three groups of undergraduates with coffee mugs and chocolate bars. The participants in Group 1 could choose any item before completing a questionnaire, and they displayed roughly equal preferences for the two types of objects. The participants in the other two groups were initially endowed with either a mug (Group 2) or a chocolate bar (Group 3), and then, after completing the questionnaire, they were given the opportunity to exchange the item for an object of the other type. The main finding was that nearly 90% of these participants retained the item they were endowed with, even though presumably only half of them would have picked the same type of object if they had been given a choice at the outset (as shown by the preference test). Several different explanations of such economically irrational behavior have been offered (Jones & Brosnan, 2008; Plott & Zeiler, 2005, 2007; Tversky & Kahneman, 1991, 1992). But for present purposes what matters most is the general point that the endowment effect seems to reveal a strong propensity not just to over-value one’s own possessions, but to treat them as elements of one’s extended self. In keeping with this view, Wolf, Arkes, and Muhanna (2008) showed that the endowment effect for mugs is significantly influenced by the amount of tactile contact that participants have with them (see also Newman & Bloom, 2014). This suggests that the more bodily interaction one has with an owned object, the more likely one is to regard it as an extension of ‘‘me.’’ In addition, Constable, Kritikos, and Bayliss (2011) showed that the endowment effect for mugs can modulate deepseated aspects of visuomotor processing. Specifically, when participants made judgments about stimuli that were presented on the handles of mugs that had previously been assigned ownership to either themselves or the experimenter, standard stimulus–response compatibility effects were normal when the mugs belonged to themselves but were abolished when they belonged to the experimenter. Returning to the brain, the sense of possessing certain inanimate objects has recently been explored with fMRI. Turk, van Bussel, Waiter, and Macrae (2011) asked participants to categorize everyday items as either self-owned or other-owned, and found that the recognition of self-owned items uniquely engaged the medial prefrontal cortex as well as the insula and supramarginal gyrus. Similarly, Kim and Johnson (2012) discovered that the endowment effect is linked with activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, and Kim and Johnson (2014) subsequently showed that this mind-brain connection is present even when ownership is processed implicitly (see also Krigolson, Hassall, Balcom, & Turk, 2013). In fact, these researchers argue that their results ‘‘provide neural evidence for the idea that personally relevant external stimuli may be incorporated into one’s sense of self’’ (Kim & Johnson, 2014, p. 1; see also Abraham, 2013). Further insight into the neurocognitive basis of the relationship between the core (corporeal) self and the extended (extracorporeal) self comes from the literature on somatoparaphrenia. So far only a few studies have carefully investigated whether—and if so, to what degree—this disorder goes beyond body parts to encompass other possessions as well. But even though the data are scanty, they are quite revealing. For one thing, it appears that in many patients the delusion of disownership is restricted to the affected limb. For example, Fotopoulou et al. (2011) describe a patient who clearly retained the ability to recognize her ‘‘personal’’ hospital mug, regardless of whether it was in proximity to her alienated hand. Such findings indicate that, in the domain of possession, dissociations can occur between the body and various objects closely associated with it. In other patients, however, complex bidirectional interactions have been reported between the affected limb and possessed items that are frequently in contact with it. For instance, a patient described by Sandifer (1946, p. 123) falsely believed that her left hand belonged to the doctor, but then she recognized a ring on one of the fingers and said, ‘‘That’s my ring; you’ve got my ring, doctor.’’ Remarkably enough, this realization led to the temporary dispersal of the delusion, thereby illustrating how noncorporeal elements of the extended self can influence corporeal elements of the core self. Even more interesting, however, is that the opposite pattern has also been documented, specifically by Aglioti, Smania, Manfredi, and Berlucchi (1996), whose patient also denied possession of her left hand. In one of the experiments, an examiner asked her to indicate whether she owned certain hand-related objects, including rings, watches, combs, brushes, knives, scissors, and holy icons. When the objects were placed in her normal right hand, all of her judgments were accurate,

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but when they were placed in her repudiated left hand, she incorrectly denied possessing the ones that did in fact belong to her, while also correctly rejecting ownership of the others. For example, when one of her rings was placed in her good right hand, she immediately recognized it as her own and recalled many autobiographical details about it (e.g., ‘‘I remember quite clearly that this ring was given to me by my late husband’’). However, when the same ring was placed in her bad left hand a few minutes later, she maintained that although it looked similar to the one she had seen earlier, it was not hers. Thus, in this particular case, because the left hand was no longer treated as ‘‘mine,’’ the associated paraphernalia were likewise disowned, at least when viewed and evaluated in the context of the now-foreign body part. More generally, Aglioti et al. (1996) suggest that these results bolster James’s (1890) original proposal that there is a tight link between the body schema and the representation of closely related, personally significant possessions. 3. Linguistic typology and the semantics of the personal sphere Switching now to issues involving the linguistic representation of ownership, it may come as a surprise that less than half of the roughly 6000 languages in the world contain a verb like have for asserting the existence of some kind of possessive relationship, as in the sentence Bill has a dog (Stassen, 2009). It is generally assumed, however, that all languages contain at least one grammatical construction for encoding possession, and it is well-established that many languages contain two or more such constructions that differ not only in their morphosyntactic properties but also, and more interestingly, with regard to the semantic classes of the possessed entities (Aikhenvald & Dixon, 2013; Chappell & McGregor, 1995; Dixon, 2010b; Heine, 1997; Nichols, 1988; Seiler, 1983; Stolz, Kettler, Stroh, & Urdze, 2008; Velazquez-Castillo, 1996). Now, it turns out that English uses the same suffix to signal the possession of all kinds of entities, including body parts (e.g., Bill’s hand), blood kin (e.g., Bill’s mother), affinal kin (e.g., Bill’s wife), attributes (e.g., Bill’s pride), associations (e.g., Bill’s homeland), and objects (e.g., Bill’s pen). Numerous other languages, however, use different devices to indicate the possession of different sets of entities. Two major constructions are often employed, one for so-called ‘‘inalienable’’ possession and another for so-called ‘‘alienable’’ possession. Although the contrast between these two categories is fairly rigid in individual languages, comparative cross-linguistic studies have revealed that the semantic criteria for inalienability are not universal but instead somewhat variable, presumably reflecting cultural differences in the degree of conceptualized closeness between possessors and certain types of possessed entities. In general, however, the inalienable category tends to be restricted to possessions that are construed as being integrally related to their owner’s identity (e.g., body parts and kin), whereas the alienable category includes all sorts of unessential possessions. These points are elaborated below. In one of the first and most influential investigations of this topic, Bally (1926/1995) argued that inalienability captures what he called the ‘‘personal sphere,’’ a malleable realm which encompasses, for a given speech community, possessed entities that are conventionally treated as being either inherent to their owner or highly relevant to their owner’s individuality. This idea is obviously quite similar to the notion in cognitive neuroscience of a continuum between the core self and the extended self, but we will refrain from exploring the nature of this resemblance until the last section of the paper. Here the goal is simply to describe some of the cross-linguistic manifestations of inalienability, focusing on the key semantic factors that seem to motivate the pertinent grammatical constructions, while ignoring the morphosyntactic forms of those constructions. (The data presented below come from Chappell and McGregor (1995) and Dixon (2010b). Also, the classification and location of unfamiliar languages are included in parentheses.) An especially important point is that body parts are almost always categorized as inalienable. Moreover, if they become detached from their owner, they tend to switch linguistic status to alienable. But even though many languages, such as Yidiñ (Pama-Nyungan, Australia) and Acholi (Nilotic, Africa), treat essentially all attached body parts as inalienable, some languages exclude certain parts. To take a few examples, Creek (Muskogean, Oklahoma) excludes genitalia; Koyukon (Athabaskan, Alaska) excludes bodily excretions; and Mohawk (Iroquoian, Ontario) excludes hair as well as internal organs, supposedly because they are uncontrollable. Continuing with the theme of control, it is also notable that Dakota (Siouan, Dakotas) distinguishes between two subtypes of inalienable body parts—those that are particularly subject to will-power (e.g., ‘‘mouth,’’ ‘‘eye,’’ ‘‘hand’’), and those that are not (e.g., ‘‘nose,’’ ‘‘liver,’’ ‘‘blood’’). (For further subdivisions between body parts, see Abbi’s (2011) analysis of Great Andamanese.) Although some languages—for instance, Jarawara (Arawá, Brazil)—do not extend their domain of inalienable possession from body parts to kin, many languages do. In fact, several different patterns have been documented, some of which are as follows. Panare (Carib, Venezuela) treats both blood relations and affinal relations as inalienable, but Lango (Nilotic, Uganda) treats blood relations as inalienable and affinal relations as alienable. As Dixon (2010a, p. 6) notes, this distinction has a clear basis: ‘‘A blood (or ‘consanguineal’) relation such as ‘mother’ or ‘son’ is as inalienable as a body part like ‘foot’ or ‘eye’. In contrast, a relationship through marriage (called ‘affinal’), such as ‘husband’ or ‘mother-in-law’, is far from immutable, since a person can get divorced.’’ It is also worth mentioning that some languages split kin into inalienable and alienable subsets according to other criteria, such as age (e.g., Mohawk, Iroquoian, Ontario) or authority (e.g., Gapapaiwa, Austronesian, Papua New Guinea). Finally, quite a few languages incorporate into their inalienable category certain attributes and associations of a person. The attributes that tend to receive such treatment are mental traits/states (e.g., ‘‘pride,’’ ‘‘honesty,’’ ‘‘anger’’), physical properties (e.g., ‘‘smell,’’ ‘‘height,’’ ‘‘shadow’’), illnesses (e.g., ‘‘fever,’’ ‘‘toothache,’’ ‘‘sickness’’), and various other characteristics (e.g., ‘‘fame,’’ ‘‘wealth,’’ ‘‘bad luck’’). With regard to associations, the most frequently occurring ones are important

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non-kin social relations (e.g., ‘‘friend,’’ ‘‘master,’’ ‘‘shaman’’), habitats (e.g., ‘‘house,’’ ‘‘homeland,’’ ‘‘grave’’), and valuable artifacts (e.g., ‘‘clothing,’’ ‘‘jewelry,’’ ‘‘spear’’). Overall, the literature strongly suggests that in languages that grammaticalize the conceptual category of inalienability, the prototypical members are body parts and kin. To some degree, this is because those classes of entities are inherently relational, with a very high level of semantic dependence on their possessors. Thus, just as notions like ‘‘arm,’’ ‘‘leg,’’ and ‘‘ear’’ are necessarily conceptualized in the context of a whole body, so notions like ‘‘mother,’’ ‘‘father,’’ and ‘‘son’’ are necessarily conceptualized in the context of a whole family. This explanation is only half the story, however, because body parts and kin also have tremendous significance to their possessors. They are, as Bally (1926/1995) observed, major elements of the personal sphere. Furthermore, the idea of the personal sphere seems to be required to account for the fact that in a number of languages the construction for inalienable possession applies to certain privileged entities that are not objectively relational in the same ways as body parts and kin, but are nevertheless subjectively relational insofar as they are conventionally thought of as being integral to the identity of their owner. Velazquez-Castillo (1996, p. 37) makes this point as follows: ‘‘For example, in a hunting society, it would be natural to conceive of the relation between a hunter and his arrow ... as very close, in such a way that the arrow can be seen as an intrinsic aspect of being a hunter or a ‘man’.’’ The author goes on to say that although the referential scope of inalienability cannot always be predicted by cultural patterns, it can usually be understood in terms of such patterns once it has been determined. 4. Exploring the interdisciplinary connections The material summarized above indicates that during the past few decades, two disciplines that rarely come together— namely, cognitive neuroscience and linguistic typology—have been independently generating remarkably similar results regarding the representational domain of personal possessions. In particular, these two fields have been converging on the view that although the self depends primarily on body ownership, it embraces a variety of other possessions too, especially those that play a key role in defining one’s identity. This view is supported on the one hand by psychological and neuroscientific research pointing to a continuum between the core (corporeal) self and the extended (extracorporeal) self, and on the other hand by linguistic research pointing to a geographically widespread grammatical-semantic category of inalienability which tends to include body parts as well as other entities falling within the personal sphere. The psychological and neuroscientific findings may actually help to explain the linguistic findings, since they disclose several aspects of a complex ‘‘self system’’ that seems to motivate many speech communities to incorporate into their language a distinct construction for inalienable possession. This admittedly speculative account has two main components. First, some aspects of the self system—aspects that are implemented in multisensory fronto-temporo-parietal circuits together with the insula and medial prefrontal cortex—are critically involved in body ownership, and they may also prompt some languages to develop a category of inalienability that is restricted almost entirely to body parts. Second, other aspects of the self system— aspects that rely predominantly on the medial prefrontal cortex—represent the personal significance of possessions beyond the body, and they may also be responsible for the fact that in some languages the category of inalienability encompasses additional classes of entities, such as family, friends, and certain kinds of valuable objects. If we assume, for the sake of argument, that this account is on the right track, the question arises as to why all languages do not have separate constructions for alienable and inalienable possession. Comparable questions could be asked, however, about myriad other grammatical-semantic categories that are not universal but instead exhibit patterned cross-linguistic variation, such as number, gender, case, tense, aspect, and evidentiality (Evans & Levinson, 2009; Haspelmath, Dryer, Gil, & Comrie, 2005). For most of these categories, the explanation for so much diversity is not clear, but it is notable that languages with complex morphology tend to be found in relatively small speech communities (Lupyan & Dale, 2010), and this generalization applies to languages that encode inalienability (Dixon, 2010b, pp. 278). Furthermore, as described above, when a language does grammaticalize the category of inalienability, it usually draws the boundaries for membership in rigid, rule-governed ways that are somewhat idiosyncratic. While there are undoubtedly some basic conceptual guidelines that may be inspired and constrained by the aforementioned body- and non-body-based aspects of the self system, there are also numerous cross-linguistic differences that seem to reflect the vagaries of cultural concerns. For instance, as already indicated, sometimes the inalienable category includes all body parts except excretions, and sometimes it applies to blood relations but not affinal relations. Such restrictions have some degree of arbitrariness, but conventionalized cut-offs must be made somewhere so that speakers can adopt a shared, coordinated protocol for efficient verbal communication. Finally, it is worth mentioning a few additional questions that are raised by the interdisciplinary data about ownership. Suppose that a research team conducted a traditional experiment involving the rubber hand illusion, only the participants spoke a language that had distinct constructions for alienable and inalienable possession. Would they tend to use the alienable construction to refer to ‘‘their’’ rubber hand before the induction of the illusion, and then switch to the inalienable one afterward? And suppose that a neurologist identified somatoparaphrenia in a brain-damaged man whose language distinguished between alienable and inalienable possession. Would the patient use the alienable construction when referring to ‘‘his’’ affected limb, as if it had been physically detached from his body? These are only some of the intriguing issues that arise when one considers the various ways in which cognitive neuroscience and linguistic typology have led to similar insights about the mental representation of ownership.

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