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Possessive relations can be expressed in different ways. A major distinction is the one between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ possessor constructions (König & Haspelmath 1998 and Payne & Barshi 1999, among others). In the former type, exemplified in (1), the possessor is a dependent of the possessee, whereas in the latter type, exemplified in (2) the possessor functions as an argument at clause level. (1) DUTCH Het apparaat glipte uit zijn vingers the device slipped out his fingers ‘The device slipped from his fingers’ (2) DUTCH De zeep glipte hem uit de vingers the soap slipped him out the fingers ‘The soap slipped from his fingers’ In the scholarly literature, there is disagreement on the construction’s distribution in the West-Germanic languages. Some argue, for instance, that it is productive in Dutch, whereas others state it is obsolescent at best (see e.g. Haspelmath 1999 vs. Van Pottelberghe 2001). What is agreed upon, however, is that the external possessor distribution follows a ‘Van Haeringen’-constellation (English < Dutch < German), with a near-absence in English, and a relatively strong vitality in German. The conspicuous absence of the external possessor construction in English is commonly explained through language contact: Vennemann (2002) argues it is the result of Celtic and (Hamito-)Semitic influence and McWhorter’s (2002) ascribes it to the language contact situation of the Viking settlements in England. Alternatively, the external possessor is seen as a feature of ‘Standard Average European’ (SAE) (see Haspelmath 1998:277-278; Haspelmath 2001:1498; Heine & Kuteva 2006:24; Harbert 2007:11; Van der Auwera 2011), a Sprachbund which English participates in much more marginally than German and Dutch. This SAE Sprachbund is ultimately due to language contact as well. In line with Van de Velde & Lamiroy (forthc. 2015), it will be argued in this talk that all three accounts (Vennemann’s, McWhorter’s and the SAE account) face serious problems, and suffer from an English bias. Taking a wider perspective, including diachronic data from Germanic as well as Romance, it will be argued here that the differential distribution of the external possessor is the result of grammaticalisation processes in de noun phrase (see Lamiroy 2003; Van de Velde 2009). The increasing configurationality of the noun phrase (Van de Velde et al. 2014, and references cited there), yielded an increasing number of slots for premodifiers, which got occupied more frequently in the course of time. This drained the external possessive. The latter account gives a better prediction of the actual distribution of the external possessor in Germanic and Romance languages. References: Harbert, W. 2007. The Germanic languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haspelmath, M. 1998. How young is Standard Average European? Language Sciences 20(3): 271-287. Haspelmath, M. 1999. External possession in a European areal perspective. In: D.L. Payne & I. Barshi (eds.), External possession. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 109-135. Haspelmath, M. 2001. The European linguistic area: Standard Average European. In: M. Haspelmath, E. König, W. Oesterreicher & W. Raible (eds.), Language typology and language universals. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 1492-1510. Havers, W. 1911. Untersuchungen zur Kasussyntax der indogermanischen Sprachen. Straßburg: Karl J. Trübner. Heine, B. & T. Kuteva. 2006. The Changing Languages of Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. König, E. & M. Haspelmath. 1998. Les constructions à possesseur externe dans les langues d'Europe. In: J. Feuillet (ed.), Actance et valence dans les langues de l'Europe. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 525-606. Lamiroy, B. 2003. Grammaticalization and external possessor structures in Romance and Germanic languages. In: M. Coene & Y. D’hulst (eds.), From NP to DP. Volume 2: The expression of possession in noun phrases. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 257-280. McWhorter, J.H. 2002. ‘What happened to English?’ Diachronica 19: 217-272. Payne, D.L. & I. Barshi. 1999. External possession. What, where, how, and why? In: D.L. Payne & I. Barshi (eds.), External possession. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 3-29. Van der Auwera, J. 2011. ‘Standard Average European’. In: B. Kortmann & J. van der Auwera (eds.), The languages and linguistics of Europe. A comprehensive guide. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 291-306. Van de Velde, F. 2009. De nominale constituent. Structuur en geschiedenis. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Van de Velde, F., P. Sleeman & H. Perridon. 2014. ‘The adjective in Germanic and Romance: development, differences and similarities’. In: P. Sleeman, F. Van de Velde & H. Perridon (eds.), Adjectives in Germanic and Romance. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 1-32. Van de Velde, F. & B. Lamiroy. Forthcoming, 2015. ‘External possessors in West Germanic and Romance: differential speed in the drift towards NP configurationality’. In: H. Cuyckens, L. Ghesquière & D. Van Olmen (eds.), Aspects of grammaticalization: (inter)subjectification, analogy and unidirectionality. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Van Pottelberge, J. 2001. ‘Sprachbünde: Beschreiben sie Sprachen oder Linguisten?’. Linguistik Online 8, 1/01. Vennemann, T. 2002. ‘On the rise of ‘Celtic’ syntax in Middle English’. In: P.J. Lucas & A.M. Lucas (eds.), Middle English from tongue to text: Selected papers from the Third International Conference on Middle English: Language and Text, held at Dublin, Ireland, 1-4 July 1999. Bern: Peter Lang. 203-234.