Old data, new cognates: the case of the 'marker of alienable possession' in the Kamak , Purí, and Krenák families

In Macro-Jê, cases of shared grammatical peculiarities play an essential role in corroborating hypotheses of genetic relationships. One of such “shared aberrancies” is a morpheme which signals indirect possession, initially described for Jê, Boróro, Maxakalí, and Kipeá (Rodrigues 1992, Ribeiro 2002). The present note describes the occurrence of likely cognates of this morpheme in three other families (Kamak , Purí, and Krenák), illustrating the importance, for Macro-Jê historical linguistics, of fragmentary data from poorly-documented languages.