Body and dative external possessors in Old English

Abstract

This chapter documents the use of dative external possessors in Old English with words referring to the human body or parts of it and compares this with the use of internal possessors. It is shown that with subject and object possessa, dative external possessors were nearly restricted to situations in which the possessor was adversely affected, but they were in variation with internal possessors even in the earliest English in these situations, a variation that cannot be attributed to Latin influence. The widely held belief that dative external possessors were dominant over internal possessors in OE is probably due to the fact that previous studies have not distinguished possessa in the role of object of preposition, where the possessor did not have to be affected from other roles. The chapter establishes differences between the poetry and prose texts.