An Index to Measure Contingency of English Sentences *

Abstract

Several indexes to measure contingency of sentences were constructed by considering nouns, repeated nouns, and total number of words. Contingency was operationally defined as reconstructibility in order to test the several indexes against a criterion. The best form of the index was then selected and retested. The contingency ranking, based on the index, of ten sections of text correlated 0 84 with the reconstructibility ranking. It was concluded that the index is a valid initial approximation to a measure of contingency if contingency is defined as reconstructibility.