Re: Agglutinativity Index (was: Re: What's a good isolating language to look at)

Dirk Elzinga wrote:
>A zero morph in the American Structuralist tradition is the
>unpredictable absence of overt marking for some category. An example
>of a genuine zero morph occurs in the plural for English words like
>'deer' and 'fish'. In English, the plural is usually marked; in these
>words, unexpectedly, there is no marking. Since the passive, for
>example, is not marked morphologically (it's a syntactic construction
>involving the past participle and the auxiliary 'be'), the absence of
>passive marking cannot be taken to be a zero morph. Even if you took
>the morph marking the past participle as marking for the passive, its
>absence in the active does not count as a zero since it is predictably
>absent.
>=========================================================================
Thanks for the information, but I'm not sure it helps me.  I want to do a
synthesis and/or agglutinativity/fusionality index determination for Ithkuil
but don't know whether to count all the default categories.  Ithkuil nouns
mandatorily inflect for nine morphological categories and verbs mandatorily
inflect for 17 categories.  However, in any given instance, the majority of
these mandatory categories have their "default" values which are usually
unmarked in Ithkuil.  I'm just trying to figure out if I should count them,
because, if so, then at an automatic minimum of ten morphemes per noun and
eighteen morphemes per verb (9 and 17 mandatory catagories respectively plus
the associated stem itself), you can be sure the synthesis index for Ithkuil
will be sky high.

--John Quijada

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