This paper presents a comparative analysis of the verb system of the three known Zamucoan languages, namely Old Zamuco, described by the Jesuit father Ignace Chomé in the first half of the eighteenth century, plus Ayoreo and Chamacoco, still actively spoken in the Chaco area between Bolivia and Paraguay. The analysis has confirmed the internal consistency of this language family, allowing us to build a plausible reconstruction of the Proto-Zamucoan verb system. The analysis has unsurprisingly pointed out Old Zamuco as the most conservative language among the three; Chamacoco, by contrast, appears to be the most innovative. This notwithstanding, Chamacoco also has conservative features that turn out to be particularly relevant for the purpose of linguistic reconstruction.

This paper presents a comparative analysis of possessive inflection in the three known Zamucoan languages: Ayoreo and Chamacoco – still spoken in the Chaco area between Bolivia and Paraguay – plus †Old Zamuco, described by the Jesuit father Ignace Chomé in the first half of the 18th century. The comparison allows us to build a plausible reconstruction of Proto-Zamucoan possessive inflection. Old Zamuco appears to be the most conservative language among the three, while Chamacoco appears to be the most innovative, although it exhibits relics of special importance for reconstructive purposes. Our analysis identifies in Zamucoan a series of features of general interest for the typology of person marking.

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This paper analyzes the interaction between language and society in the Zamucoan languages (†Old Zamuco, Ayoreo and Chamacoco), spoken in south-eastern Bolivia and northern Paraguay. I show how grammatical gender was a source for poetic metaphors, systematically shaping Ayoreo mythology, and how change in Chamacoco cosmovision correlates with the development of gender switch in animal nouns. Also, some mismatches between linguistic and natural gender reflect the role of women in Ayoreo society. The relationship between the father and the first legitimate child is particularly important for the Ayoreo and is expressed through a teknonymic suffix. The attention to the preservation of the environment and the social practice to share consumable resources are reflected in the impossibility to directly possess animals and plants in Zamucoan. Competition did not play an important role in Zamucoan societies, which are traditionally egalitarian, and there are hints that Zamucoan had originally no dedicated comparative structures.

The morphological expression of non-verbal predication is a geographically widespread, although not very frequent, typological feature. This paper highlights the existence of two radically contrasting types of non-verbal predicative inflection. Construction A has already been described in the literature. It consists of attaching person-sensitive inflection markers to non-verbal predicates, possibly extending this treatment to adverbs and adverbial phrases (locational and temporal), pronouns and quantifiers. This type is well attested in Uralic, Turkic, and Paleosiberian, as well as in some Amazonian language families (most notably Chicham), but it has also been pointed out for some sparse languages of Oceania and Africa. Such non-verbal person inflections diachronically stem from incorporation of conjugated copula elements. Construction B, by contrast, is much rarer and is described here for the first time. It also consists of a dedicated morphological form of the non-verbal predicate (limited, however, to nouns and adjectives), but such form stands out as morphologically lighter than any other form to be found in nouns or adjectives in argument or attribute position. While the latter forms carry some kind of case marker, the noun/adjective predicate merely consists (or historically did) of the word’s root. This type of construction can be found in the small Zamucoan family and still survives in some Tupí-Guaraní languages. Diachronic inspection of Semitic indicates, however, that this predicative strategy was possibly adopted in some ancient varieties, although at later stages it intertwined with the expression of referential specificity. The paper compares the two construction types, highlighting similarities and differences.