Diachronica - Volume 34, Issue 3, 2017

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.

All modern Basque dialects have at least 5 contrastive vowels /i, e, a, o, u/. One Basque dialect, Zuberoan, has developed a contrastive sixth vowel, the front rounded high vowel /y/. This development is arguably due to sustained contact with neighboring Gallo-Romance languages. This paper supports empirically the historical development of the /u/ vs. /y/ contrast and provides a detailed analysis of the contexts that inhibited the /u/ > /y/ sound change. Fronting was inhibited when the vowel was followed by an apical sibilant, a tap /ɾ/ or an rT cluster (where r is a rhotic, and T an alveolar obstruent), arguably due to coarticulatory effects. Fronting occurred when /s̻/, /r/ or non-coronal rhotic-obstruent clusters followed /u/. Zuberoan /u/-fronting illustrates the importance of language contact and phonetics in the phonological analysis of historical developments.

This paper discusses how the argument structure of experience predicates may be affected by semantic factors in Indo-European. I investigate whether the semantic role of the experiencer is preferably expressed by the nominative or by an oblique case in various predicates of volition, cognition, propositional attitude, psychological experience and physical perception in each Indo-European branch, with particular consideration of Hittite, Old Indic, Ancient Greek, Latin, Classical Armenian and Tocharian. In my data, while the nominative coding of the experiencer tends to be generalized to heterogeneous semantic classes of experience predicates, an oblique experiencer occurs with more specific lexical categories, that is, the predicate like/please on the one hand and predicates of negative experience on the other. Interestingly, negative experiences of being sad, sick or unlucky are syntactically associated with oblique experiencers much more commonly than their correspondent positive experiences of being happy, healthy or lucky. This asymmetrical representation of negative and positive experiences has parallels in other language families and may have a cognitive motivation, whereby bad physical or psychological conditions are conceptualized as external forces attacking unwilling humans who have no control of them. This may be relevant not only for the currently debated issue of Indo-European argument marking, but also for an integration of semantic and cognitive principles into historical linguistics.