(By Balthasar Bickel and Johanna Nichols): "Grammatical categories like tense, voice, or agreement can be expressed either by individual words or by affixes attached to some other word (or the stem of a word). If a word combines with affixes, the resulting construction is said to be synthetic; if not, it is said to be analytic. For example, in the past tense, the English verb combines with an affix expressing tense (cf. she painted, with suffix -ed). Forms like painted are called synthetic. In the future tense, by contrast, the verb does not combine with an affix; the future is instead expressed by a separate word (will, as in she will paint ). Expressions like will paint are called analytic... Within the same language, verbs can be used with more or less synthesis: the English past, for example, is more synthetic than the future. For surveying purposes, we looked for the maximally inflected verb form, i.e. the one form that is most synthetic, and determined its category-per-word value ("cpw value"). In English, the maximally inflected verb form expresses two categories: agreement (in the present: -s) and tense (past: -ed). The English verb has therefore a synthesis degree of 2 cpw (=categories per word)."