Subordination Index (SI)

SI = total number of clauses / number of C-units

The Subordination Index is a measure of syntactic complexity which produces a ratio of the total number of clauses (main and subordinate clauses) to the number of utterances (Loban, 1963, Strong, 1998, Hughes, et. al, 1997). A clause, whether it is main or subordinate, is a statement containing both a subject and a predicate. Grammatically, a subject is a noun phrase and a predicate is a verb phrase. Main clauses can stand by themselves. Subordinate clauses depend on the main clause to make sense. They are embedded within an utterance as noun, adjective or adverbial clauses.

View the SI Scoring Guide, which contains detailing instructions for scoring transcripts.

Download the SI practice transcripts, a self-extracting zip file containing 6 practice transcripts. Run this file and you are prompted to select the folder where you want the transcripts stored. Browse to select this folder and then select Unzip. Practice by scoring these transcripts for SI, comparing your scores to the scores of our trained coders.