Chamorro’s person-animacy restriction, inertness and dynamic feature gluttony

Chamorro (Austronesian) exhibits a person-animacy restriction (PAR) with a typologically unusual property, which I refer to as 1 st -person inertness: 1 st -person pronouns are grammatical in any configuration with any other argument. This paper argues that this property poses a nontrivial problem for all contemporary theories of person-animacy restrictions in minimalist syntax: specifically it yields a paradox, the Inertness Paradox, based on two assumptions shared by almost all contemporary approaches. This can be resolved on the basis of two innovations: (i) the claim that the feature [SPECIFIC] in Chamorro is underspecified on 1st-person; and (ii) a new theory of PARs, which combines Coon & Keine’s (2021) feature gluttony model with Deal’s (2024) dynamic interaction architecture.