polysynthetic languages

Shreyas Sampat wrote:

> I'm puzzled about polysynthetism.  How does this work?  Is there some
> customary way of describing it, or is it variable enough that it's hard to
> describe.  Could someone point me to a website, perhaps?  I'm trying to
> incorporate this neat polysynthetic effect into one of my conlangs, and am
> wondering how natlangs do it.
There's a book by Mark Baker called "The Polysynthesis Parameter" (Oxford
University Press, I think), which discusses the structure of polysynthetic
languages in gory detail.  It's a fairly technical book, concerned as it is
with the characterisation of these languages within formal syntactic theory,
but if nothing else the example sentences might prove illuminating...

Matt.