Martin (1992: 305):
A further distinction can be drawn between alienable and inalienable part/whole relations. These are not grammatically distinguished in English possessive constructions (e.g. the front garden's trees and the car's boot). But when the whole is realised as a qualifier, inalienable possessives favour the preposition of, whereas alienable ones are more likely to be introduced with locative prepositions such as in, inside, within etc.
Blogger Comments:
[1] In SFL theory, composition (meronymy) and possession are two distinct subtypes of the expansion category extension (see Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: 146). Here possession is presented as a subtype of composition. That is, it misconstrues two SFL co-hyponyms as related by hyponymy.
[2] Here the relation of alienable possession (extension) is confused with the relation of location (enhancement).
