This book offers a crosslinguistic survey of polysynthetic languages, in which single multi-morpheme verb forms can express what would be whole sentences in English. It looks at a range of issues from a cross-theoretical perspective, including complexity, argument structure, language contact, and language obsolence.

• 1: Michael Fortescue, Marianne Mithun, and Nicholas Evans: Introduction


• Part I: The Nature of Polysynthesis


• 2: Östen Dahl: Polysynthesis and complexity


• 3: Marianne Mithun: Argument marking in the polysynthetic verb and its implications


• 4: Johanna Nichols: Polysynthesis and head-marking


• 5: Johanna Mattissen: Sub-types of polysynthesis


• 6: Jerrold Sadock: The subjectivity of the notion of polysynthesis


• 7: Michael Fortescue: What are the limits of polysynthesis?


• 8: Louis-Jacques Dorais: The lexicon in polysynthetic languages


• 9: Balthasar Bickel and Fernando Zuñiga: The word in polysynthetic languages: phonological and morphological challenges


• 10: Peter Trudgill: The anthropological setting of polysynthesis


• 11: Sally Rice: Phraseology in polysynthetic languages


• Part II: Areal Perspectives


• 12: Michael Fortescue: The Arctic and Sub-Arctic


• 13: Marianne Mithun: Continental North America


• 14: Carmen Jany: The northern Hokan area


• 15: Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald: Polysynthetic structures of Lowland Amazonia


• 16: Nicholas Evans: Northern Australia


• 17: William A. Foley: Papua New Guinea


• Part III: The Diachronic Perspective


• 18: Edward Vajda: Patterns of innovation and retention in templatic polysynthesis


• 19: T. Givón: The diachrony of complex verbs in Ute


• 20: Hein van der Voort and Peter Bakker: Polysynthesis and language contact


• 21: Ekaterina Gruzdeva and Nikolai Vakhtin: Language obsolescence in polysynthetic languages


• Part IV: Acquisition


• 22: Shanley Allen: Polysynthesis in the acquisition of Eskimo languages


• 23: Bill Forshaw, Lucinda Davidson, Barbara Kelly, Rachel Nordlinger, Gillian Wigglesworth, and Joe Blythe: The acquisition of Murrinh-Patha


• 24: Sabine Stoll, Balthasar Bickel, and Jekaterina Mazara: The acquisition of Chintang


• Part V: Grammatical Sketches


• 25: Willem J. de Reuse: Western Apache, a southern Athabaskan languages


• 26: Anthony C. Woodbury: Polysynthesis in Central Alaskan Yup'ik


• 27: Lynn Drapeau: A grammatical sketch of the Innu language (Algonquian)


• 28: Wallace Chafe: Caddo


• 29: Toshihide Nakayama: Polysynthesis in Nuuchahnulth, a Wakashan language


• 30: Honoré Watanabe: The polysynthetic nature of Salish


• 31: Una Canger: Nawatl (Uto-Aztecan)


• 32: Claudine Chamoreau: Purepecha, a polysynthetic but predominantly dependent-marking language


• 33: Fernando Zuñiga: Mapudungun


• 34: Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald: Tariana, an Arawak language from north-west Amazonia


• 35: Leo Wetzels and Stella Telles: Lakondê, a polysynthetic (Nambikwara) language of southern Amazonia


• 36: Nicholas Evans: Dalabon (Northern Australia)


• 37: Rachel Nordlinger: South Daly River (Northern Australia)


• 38: William Foley: The polysynthetic profile of Yimas, a language of New Guinea


• 39: Megumi Kurebito: Koryak


• 40: Johanna Mattissen: Nivkh


• 41: Anna Bugaeva: Polysynthesis in Ainu


• 42: Edward Vajda: Ket


• 43: Gregory D. S. Anderson: Incorporation in Sora (Munda)


• 44: Yakov G. Testelets and Yury Lander: Adyghe (Northwest Caucasian)

Michael Fortescue is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen, now associated with St Hugh's College, Oxford. His special area of interest is Arctic and Sub-Arctic languages, principally Eskimo-Aleut, but also Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Wakashan languages. He has also published extensively in the more general fields of comparative, typological, cognitive, and functional linguistics.
Marianne Mithun is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Much of her work has been in the areas of morphology, syntax, discourse, prosody, and their interrelations; language contact and language change; typology and universals; and language documentation. She has worked with numerous typologically diverse languages including Mohawk, Central Alaskan Yup'ik, Navajo, and Selayarese.
Nicholas Evans is ARC Laureate Fellow and Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the Australian National University, and Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. He has carried out wide-ranging fieldwork on traditional languages of northern Australia and southern Papua New Guinea, including Bininj Gun-wok, Dalabon, and Kayardild. He has also worked as a linguist, interpreter, and anthropologist in Native Title claims.