Lexical items in wordlists may contain remnants of non-productive morphological formations. The identification of such residual morphology is one of the main challenges for historical reconstruction in South American languages. Another point of attention is the habit, frequently found in Amazonian languages, of expanding a nominal or verbal base by adding an additional root or element with a related semantic content. This procedure is often followed in order to compensate for the loss of a phonological contrast that caused two originally different forms to coincide.
In order to overcome obstacles of this kind, I advocate a proactive approach that consists in the deconstruction of the available lexical material prior to its inclusion in a comparison. In order to ensure a successful and objective comparison, the lexical material has to be analyzed and reduced to its etymological essence by first eliminating all productive and non-productive morphological elements.

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