Investigating dative external possessors in the history of English

Abstract

This chapter outlines the methodology used in gathering data for dative external possessors and internal possessors in Old and Early Middle English. Parsed electronic corpora of texts from these periods were searched for all ative external possessors of body and mind possessa playing different grammatical relations, using a list of forms of lemmas referring to these concepts. A second set of searches for internal possessors produced data allowing a comparison of internal possessors and dative external possessors. These searches used the same forms for inalienable possessions but were restricted to verbs likely to represent a situation in which the possessor was highly affected. Various problems that arose in gathering the data, such as the problem syncretism of cases can present in gathering the data, are discussed.