Luca Ciucci

 

 

 

Luca Ciucci is an Adjunct Research Fellow at the Language and Culture Research Centre (College of Arts, Society and Education) of James Cook University (Australia). He defended his doctoral dissertation in General Linguistics in 2013 at Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa). He spent several periods of fieldwork in South America investigating Zamucoan (Bolivia and Paraguay) and Chiquitano (aka Bésɨro, southeastern Bolivia) with the aim of preserving a part of our cultural heritage through language documentation. His book Inflectional Morphology in the Zamucoan Languages (Asunción, CEADUC, 2016) provided a detailed morphological description of a small family of South American Indigenous languages (i.e., Ayoreo, Chamacoco, and Old Zamuco), thus paving the way to the reconstruction of Proto-Zamucoan, which is currently underway. His approach integrates the description of endangered languages with the analysis of historical documentation to gain more general insights into typology, historical linguistics, and the interaction between language and society.