Feature sharing in possessor agreement

Inalienable possessors that are internal to an NP headed by a possessed noun show evidence in support of FEATURE SHARING through agreement between a possessor controller and a possessed target in the Arawan language Jarawara. The data indicate that, contrary to the standard view of agreement in Minimalism and LFG, agreement features can be visible in the syntactic locus of the target, as well as that of the controller under certain conditions. As a consequence of feature sharing, an inalienably possessed noun that is otherwise underspecified for gender and number can control subsequent agreement processes. This gives rise to clauses in which internal inalienable possessors superficially appear to control agreement on the verbal predicate.Morphomic structures within the agreement paradigms of Jarawara inalienably possessed nouns partly obscure which features participate in possessor agreement. Combining a morphological analysis that accommodates morphomes with a feature sharing account of agreement in inalienable possession constructions provides a robust explanation for the distribution of inalienably possessed nouns in recursive structures, a problem that was unresolved by Dixon’s (2000, 2004) original analysis of the data and Adamson’s (2024) recent treatment in Distributed Morphology.