Re: synthesis index (was: Of of)

On 4/4/06, Yahya Abdal-Aziz <yahya@...> wrote:
> On Mon, 3 Apr 2006 Peter Bleackley wrote:
> Well, I hadn't heard of the "synthesis index" before,
> so did a google for it which returned thousands of
> (mostly chemical) results, but very few to do with
> linguistics.  One of the few was Bickell & Nicholls,
> Typological Enclaves, at:
> http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~autotyp/download/enclaves@ALT5-2003BB-JN.pdf
> and another (found when I added "linguistics" to the
> search terms) was Bickell, The Autotyp Research
> Program, at:
> http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~autotyp/download/ltrc02.pdf
>
> Bickell's definition is:
> SYN = Nmax(categories) + Nmax(formatives)
> (page 159 of the latter reference), and he shows a
> map of its distribution for N (languages?) = 199 (page
> 8 of the former reference) with values of SYN from
> 0 to 28.
I've read a fair part of that PDF now, and I'm still not sure
what Bickell & Nicholls mean by their synthesis index.
It seems like they might intend  a count of how many
verbal categories are marked by inflexion in a given
language rather than separate words, but I'm not sure.
Does anyone else know what this
"SYN = N (categories) + N (formatives)"
means?

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry