28 Is Lithuanian a polysynthetic language? Peter Arkadiev Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, Russia Vilnius University, Vilnius, Lithuania Abstract. This paper reviews the defnitions and operationalisations of the notion of “polysynthesis” proposed in the typological literature and applies them to Lithuanian (verbal) morphology. It is shown that while Lithuanian falls short of polysynthesis in terms of morphemes-to-words ratio and lacks such features as polypersonalism and incorporation, it still possesses certain properties associ- ated with polysynthesis. These include the so-called lexical afxes (it is argued that Lithuanian verbal prefxes are an example of these) and, to a limited extent, “productive non-infectional concatenation”, i.e. morphemes with a high combi- natory potential and compositional meanings, including successively applying verbalisers and nominalisers. These observations not only shed novel light on some well-known facts of Lithuanian grammar, but also further underscore the multifactorial and vague nature of polysynthesis. Keywords: Lithuanian, morphology, polysynthesis, typology, verb Perhaps most linguists working on Lithuanian would consider the question put in the title of this article provocative, and the answer to it obviously in the nega- tive. Indeed, how can a well-behaved conservative Indo-European language be reasonably compared with “exotic” tongues spoken in remote places, such as Chukchi, West Greenlandic or Abkhaz? However, once the strong impetus for a typologically-informed and unbiased approach to Baltic languages has been htps://doi.org/10.15388/SBOL.2021.1 Copyright © 2021 Peter Arkadiev. Published by Vilnius University Press. This is an Open Access artcle distributed under the terms of the Creatve Commons Atributon Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distributon, and reproducton in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.