Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: This article addresses counterfactuality in Zamucoan languages (Old Zamuco, Ayoreo and Chamacoco), drawing on the available literature, unpublished historical sources and original fieldwork. Zamucoan verbs are tenseless and only distinguish a realis and an irrealis mood. The latter is associated with counterfactuality, which occurs with modality-sensitive negators and subordinators. In Old Zamuco, propositional counterfactuality is expressed by modal markers related to the Chamacoco subordinator that introduces counterfactual conditional clauses. In addition, Old Zamuco exhibits nominal counterfactual markers that interact with a peculiar inflectional system in nouns and adjectives. Counterfactual conditional constructions are described for the three languages. They may occur in para-hypotactical constructions in Ayoreo and Chamacoco, and in Ayoreo they are encoded by an irrealis subordinator and a modal marker. While Ayoreo lacks dedicated markers for hypothetical manner clauses, Old Zamuco and Chamacoco employ a number of subordinators. Several grammaticalization pathways involving counterfactuality, including typologically rare ones, are discussed.
DOI: 10.17613/ps43v-dqj65
Author: Ciucci, Luca
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4406969422