Eloise Jelinek, having worked with Salishan and Athabascan languages, proposed an analysis of polysynthetic languages in which the morphemes that agree with the arguments of the verb are not just considered indexes of the arguments, but in fact constitute the primary expression of the arguments within the sentence.
In 1996 Mark C. Baker proposed a definition of polysynthesis as a syntactic macroparameter within Noam Chomsky's "principles and parameters" program.