Contemporary Spanish seems to be undergoing an emphatic drift that may be identified, among other things, in the overuse of prenominal possessives. This seems to be a case of linguistic interference whereby the functions of English prenominal possessives are transferred to the Spanish possessives, thus displacing the definite article. For the purposes of analysing this phenomenon, we have created a corpus with items from articles of two Spanish newspapers, El País and La Vanguardia; then, we have extracted all the cases of what we call “overspecified” or overemphatic possessives and grouped them into different categories according to their function. Finally, our analysis of the categories has confirmed our initial hypothesis that there is a linguistic trend whereby the Spanish possessive takes on the functions of the English paradigm and displaces the Spanish definite article. The inflationary use of English possessive determiners is progressively bringing about a complete change of paradigm in Spanish.