Wichita is an agglutinative, polysynthetic language, meaning words have a root verb basis to which information is added; that is, morphemes ( affixes ) are added to verb roots.
32.
In a general non-theoretical sense polysynthetic languages are those languages that have a high degree of morphological synthesis, and which tend to form long complex words containing long strings of morphemes, including derivational and inflectional morphemes.
33.
A language then is " synthetic " or " synthesizing " if it tends to have more than one morpheme per word, and a polysynthetic language is a language that has " many " morphemes per word.
34.
Emmon's numerous publications included reviews, articles and books on " syntax, phonology, morphology and semantics, including on problems of tense and aspect in semantics, and on formal problems and semantic issues in the morphology of polysynthetic languages ."
This means that many polysynthetic languages mark grammatical relations between verbs and their constituents by indexing the constituents on the verb with agreement morphemes, and the relation between noun phrases and their constituents by marking the head noun with agreement morphemes.
37.
Following Sapir's understanding of Polysynthesis, his student Benjamin Lee Whorf proposed a distinction between oligosynthetic and polysynthetic languages, where the former term was applied to languages with a very small number of morphemes of which all other lexical units are composed.
38.
RGyalrong languages, unlike most Sino-Tibetan languages, are polysynthetic languages and present typologically interesting features, such as inverse marking ( Sun and Shi 2002, Jacques 2010 ), ideophones ( Sun 2004, Jacques 2008 ), and verbal stem alternations ( Sun 2000, 2004, Jacques 2004, 2008 ).
39.
Inuktitut, like other Eskimo Aleut languages, has a very rich morphological system, in which a succession of different morphemes are added to root words to indicate things that, in languages like English, would require several words to express . ( See also : Agglutinative language and Polysynthetic language ).
40.
This characterization was shown to be wrong, since many indigenous American languages are not polysynthetic, but it is a fact that polysynthetic languages are not evenly distributed throughout the world, but more frequent in the Americas, Australia, Siberia, and New Guinea; however, there are also examples in other areas.
