Les noms de parties du corps et la possession inaliénable : le cas des constructions datives

This paper analyzes nouns that can enter into an external possessor construction in French such as ça lui a soulagé la conscience. Among these nouns, there is a radical discrepancy between those which denote an essential property of human beings and those which do not. In the first case, the dative clitic is an obligatory antecedent for the predication of a possessive relation. With other nouns, the relation is not anaphoric.