This book contains 44 chapters on polysynthetic patterns, of which 20 are grammatical sketches of little-known languages with intriguing grammatical structures: 11 languages of the Americas, 3 languages of Sahul, and 6 languages of (mostly northeastern) Eurasia. Ten further chapters take an areal or diachronic perspective, and again the Americas and Sahul are prominent, but Eurasia is not completely neglected. Three chapters discuss the acquisition of relevant languages on three continents. The remaining 11 chapters deal with general issues, such as complexity, phraseology, the lexicon, head marking, the notion of the “word”, and the sociolinguistic environment. This is obviously a very impressive volume, and anyone who wants to make general statements about grammatical patterns of human languages should be aware of the often surprising phenomena that are presented here in an accessible way. Some examples of the kinds of verbal expressions that lead linguists to speak of “polysynthesis” are given in (1)–(5), taken from different chapters of the handbook.

中文翻译：

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关于多合成的最后一句话：评论文章

本书包含有关多合成模式的44章，其中20篇是语法结构鲜为人知的鲜为人知的语言的语法草图：美洲11种语言，3种萨胡尔语言和6种（主要是东北亚）欧亚大陆语言。后面的十章从区域或历时的角度出发，美洲和Sahul再次突出，但欧亚大陆并没有被完全忽略。三章讨论了三大洲相关语言的习得。其余11章涉及一般性问题，例如复杂性，用语，词典，头部标记，“单词”的概念以及社会语言环境。这显然是非常令人印象深刻的书，任何想对人类语言的语法模式做出一般性陈述的人，都应该意识到这里以一种可访问的方式呈现的通常令人惊讶的现象。在（1）–（5）中给出了一些语言表达形式的示例，这些语言表达形式引起语言学家说“多合成”，它们取自手册的不同章节。