It has been assumed that the inalienable possession meaning and the affectedness meaning of the possessor are crucial factors that license external possession constructions (EPCs) in Korean. Previous studies that deal with these conditions semantically or syntactically face theoretical or empirical problems. This paper argues that the acceptability or felicity of EPCs depends on the pragmatic salience of the possessor that establishes an inalienable part-of relation with the possessee in a given context. The pragmatic account is based on the actual EPC examples found in newspapers and blogs, which show that the affectedness condition is not a necessary condition for EPCs. It is proposed that the possessor in an EPC is presented saliently or highlighted by shifting the possessee nominal to a predicate modifier that presupposes the existence of an inalienable possessor.