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The papers deal with a range of questions raised for linguistic theory and description by polysynthetic languages. Prototypical polysynthetic lamguages, found among unrelated language families in such varied parts of the world as North America, Meso-America, Siberia, northern Australia, and Papua New Guinea, display remarkably similar suites of grammatical characteristics. But, nearly two centuries after Humboldt and Kleinschmidt began to make the existence and interest of polysythetic languages widely known among linguistics, languages of this type continue to pose a challange to every major linguistic theory.