"Grammar Lesson" is a 1977 short story by Larry Niven is his Draco Tavern series, conveniently collected in a single volume since 2006 which you can acquire at that preceding Amazon Affiliate link.
It's short--less than 5 pages--and I had completely forgotten about it until it came up in a comment on my earlier post about Linguistics as the Science of Science Fiction. I finally managed to unpack my Larry Niven collection and find that short story collection in particular to verify the details of the story, so here we are!
The bulk of the story is a Chirpsithra (a recurring sort of alien in the Draco Tavern stories) relating to the barkeeper a story explaining how they were able to win an interstellar war, because they were willing to evacuate planets that they had previously settled. The supposed reason for this willigness is that the Chirpsithra language, Lottl, refers to inhabited planets with "extrinsic" possession, rather than "intrinsic" possession, while humans are too attached to our homes because we fail to distinguish different kinds of possession.
This is a neat example of linguistics inspiring a science fiction story--I don't know off-hand of any other examples where grammatical alienability is a key part of the story--but it's kind of disappointing in a few ways, as well. The story-within-a-story comes up as the eponymous Grammar Lesson as a result of the barkeeper making a mistake in Lottl grammar when speaking to his Chirpsithra patron, despite having studied the language for nearly 30 years. Supposedly, this is a particularly difficult feature to acquire, because, according to the Chirpsithra, "All [human] languages seem to use one possessive for all purposes." And, well, that's just not true! Niven did put that statement in the mouth of an alien, who presumably isn't familiar with all the languages of Earth, and even included a hedge, so it's possible he knew it was false, but it is a very potentially-misleading setup for the average Anglophone reader with no linguistic training of their own. In fact, there are tons of different types of possession that are grammaticalized in various human languages--and even English makes subtle distinctions in the uses of the "Saxon genitive" (i.e., adding an apostrophe-"s" to things) and the analytical genitive using "of". Thus, I find it rather unconvincing that a human who is capable of learning an alien language at all would have that particular trouble with it after using it on the job for nearly 30 years.
Additionally, this comes down to another instance of sci-fi Whorfianism--the existence of different types of possessives in their language made the Chirpsithra capable of concieving and acting on a military strategy that would've been impossible for humans, given our more constrained languages. And yet... retreating and salting the fields is a strategy that humans who did not have a grammatical alienability distinction in possessives actually came up with multiple times in the real world. And it didn't need to be Whorfian! There are all sorts of other ways that this kind of grammatical quirk could be integrated into a sci-fi story that have nothing to do with exemplifying or manipulating the speakers' psychology. Brandon Sanderson actually gives a good example of this in the Mistborn trilogy... which is something I shall have to discuss after I get my hands on Secret Project Four and can do a Big Unified Sanderson Linguistics Post.
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I took the story to mean that the enemy did have a similar distinction among possessives, but divided them differently.
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