POSSESSIVE DATIVE REVISITED: ANOTHER VIEW OF EXTERNAL POSSESSION IN SPANISH Carmen Conti Abstract. This paper deals with the question of which factors constrain the merging of possessive dative in Spanish. In particular, I will check to what extent the most important explanations of the construction, such as the affectedness condition as well as the structural approaches of this phenomenon, account for the employment of possessive dative in contemporary Spanish. My aim in this paper will be to demonstrate that the merging of possessive dative is related to several factors, among which the saliency of the possessor and its resemblance with semantic controllers seem to play an important role. 1. Introduction Possessor may be coded by means of several markers in Spanish. We may employ a possessive determiner (e.g. mi ÔmyÕ, tu ÔyourÕ, su Ôhis/her, theirÕ, etc.), a noun complement with de (e.g. el libro de Pedro lit. ÔThe book of PeterÕ) or a dative phrase (e.g. a dative clitic, like me Ôto meÕ, nos Ôto usÕ, te Ôto youÕ, os Ôto you (pl.)Õ, le Ôto him/herÕ, les Ôto themÕ, and/or a prepositional phrase with a ÔtoÕ). 1 The relatively free merging of these markers (even in the case of inalienable possession) has led some scholars, like Garcı´a (1975) and to some point Kliffer (1983), to pose that the coding of possession in Spanish is not grammatically constrained. According to Kliffer (1983), inalienable possession in this language should not be only interpreted by means of grammatical or syntactic properties of a given structure, but also by inferential and discursive principles. By contrast, several scholars, like Demonte (1988), Kemp- chisky (1992) and more recently Sa´ nchez (2007), have tried to account for the alternation among possessive markers by invoking just strict constraints on syntactic structure. This paper deals with the conditions that seem to be involved in the merging of the so-called possessive dative (e.g. Le cortaron la pierna lit. ÔThey cut the leg to him/herÕ, ÔThey cut his/her legÕ). My view of this construction will be in between KlifferÕs statement, on the one hand, and structural analyses of external possession/possessive dative, on the other. I agree with Kliffer (1983) that possession in Spanish may be coded by several markers without an evident grammatical motivation, which, 1 The accusative and the dative are isomorphic forms in first person and second person clitics. Clitics are distinguished formally for accusative and dative in the case of third person pronouns, and only in certain areas. The third person accusative clitic is lo for singular masculine, los for plural masculine, la for singular feminine, and las for plural feminine. Studia Linguistica 65(2) 2011, pp. 170–197. Ó The author 2011. Ó The Editorial Board of Studia Linguistica 2011. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA