The «emphatic» possession has been traditionally related to American Spanish, specially, surfacing in language-contact situations. Taking this for granted, the present paper explores the sociolinguistic and dialectal distribution of this possessive construction in European Spanish and attempts to characterize it both semantically and syntactically. This paper analyzes over 20,000 tokens of possessive pronouns. Data are extracted from two corpus representative of the spoken varieties of urban and rural European Spanish. The analysis confirms the colloquial-familiar character of this syntactic construction and supports that the so-called «redundant» possessive acts as an index of type-shifting from a sortal to a relational noun.