PolySynthesis 6.0 -- bicentennial edition

Even 197 years after its introduction, the notion of polysynthesis remains one of the most intriguing and controversial tools in the (morphological) typologist's toolbox. Several --occasionally contradictory--definitions have been proposed, employed for various purposes, and debated to this very day, but neither practitioners nor theoreticians have reached a comfortable level of consensus regarding its most effective and efficient form yet. The present talk maps the evolution of the notion, discusses its usefulness, and contends that the tool can be made better by updating it minimally with respect to its form and substantially with respect to its conceptual foundations. The former aspect of the update consists of making the notion more precise via explicit qualification; the latter bears relation to our arguably problematic understanding of the pairs lexical vs. grammatical and word vs. clause.