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

John Quijada, On 10/12/2005 07:10:
> 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.
The index of fusion is, I think, the average number of meanings or
morphosyntactic features encoded per morpheme (qua minimal unit of meaningful
phonological form).

The other index (which I'd thought was the index of synthesis, but which
haste forbids me from checking) is the average number of morphemes per
phonological word.

A simple approach, e.g. for Ithkuil, would be to take the average number of
morphemes per word (-- by the above definition, there are no zero morphs)
and the average number of meanings/morphosyntactic features per word. This
would also allow you to calculate the average number of meanings per
morpheme.

--And.