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.