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

On 12/8/05, John Quijada <jq_ithkuil@inreach.com > wrote:
> I'm not understanding something about this synthesis index.  Do zero-marked
> morpheme values get counted when determining the index?  For example, all
> finite English verb forms carry semantic values for person, number, tense,
> mood, and voice.  That's five separate morphological categories plus the
> stem itself for a total of six morphemes.  However, in a sentence such as
> "We sing" only one of these six morphemes is morpho-phonologically
> manifested/marked by the verb form, that being the stem; all the remaining
> five morphemes are zero-marked "default" categories (present tense,
> indicative mood, first person, plural number, active voice).  So does the
> word "sing" in "We sing" get counted as one morpheme or as six morphemes for
> purposes of determining the morpheme count?
As I read Greenberg's paper, it seems clear to me that in calculating
the synthesis index he counts only the _morphs_. I don't recall if he
counts zero morphs, but the catgories you describe aren't zero morphs.
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.

Dirk
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