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In dementia in inflecting and agglutinating languages, morphosyntax is much better preserved than lexical access or pragmatics, but little is known about how dementia affects language in polysynthetic agglutinating languages with their complex verb morphology. Fortuitously, a series of narratives by a skilled Arapaho storyteller includes sessions from late in his life, when he was evidently dementing. Verb forms and clausal connectors in the speaker’s Arapaho predementia and dementia narratives were sorted computationally and analyzed statistically. We found a decline in subordination and an increase in utterances missing verbs. There was a shift from using transitive active verb forms toward impersonal and passive verb forms, which require less pragmatic and syntactic computation to deploy, and a shift in subordination markers away from those requiring explicit consideration of the temporal relations between clauses.

This article argues for a three-way structural characterization of Fijian objects: common nouns can be incorporated or dislocated, but pronouns and proper nouns occur inside the VP as complements. These facts support an analysis of Fijian as a polysynthetic language, since it is a pronominal argument language with incorporated objects. Having complement nominals inside the VP, however, puts Fijian outside the scope of Baker’s (1996) polysynthesis parameter. The distribution of complements in Fijian follows from Hopper and Thompson’s (1980) transitivity hypothesis , since only those nominals with the highest degree of individuation can occur inside the VP.

In Greenlandic Eskimo, a polysynthetic language, the word-building apparatus performs much of the work that is accomplished by the syntax of more familiar languages. In particular, numerous processes in this language create verbs from nouns. Evidence of a quite unusual sort shows that these n6un-incorporation processes must follow certain ordinary syntactic rules, such as case assignment and modifier-noun agreement. The language thus falsifies pronouncements concerning the independence of syntax and word formation based on data from languages that are typologically very different from Greenlandic.*