An external possessor construction is a construction in which a notionally adnominal °possessor argument is coded like a °P-argument or °R-argument of the verb and differently from an ordinary adpossessor.
The term was first used by Vergnaud & Zubizarreta (1992) and became better known after Payne & Barshi (1999) (see also König & Haspelmath 1998).
external possessor strategy (STR) = a strategy in which a referent in a possessive relation to a participant in an event (normally in the P role or sometimes the S role of the event) is expressed as an argument of the predicate instead of in a possessive modifi- cation construction. Example: in Maasai áa-bʊak-ıtá ɔldía ‘My dog is barking,’ the portmanteau index áa- indexes the owner of the dog as the object argument of the predicate. (Section 7.5.3)