Introduction
This chapter introduces the subject matter of the book and briefly surveys the literature on dative external possessors cross-linguistically and in the history of English. This corpus-based study adds to the empirical base for assessing hypotheses about the reasons for the loss of dative external possessors as a productive construction in Middle English, drawing on recent advances in linguistic typology, syntactic theory, and language contact. Cross-linguistically, dative external possessors are most likely to be found with affected possessors of inalienable possessa. This study focuses on possessa referring to the body and the mind and compares the use of internal and external possessors, establishing the timing of the loss of the external possessor and evaluating proposed explanations for this syntactic change, including the so-called Celtic Hypothesis.