On the Functional Load of Syntactic Phenomena in Three-dimensional Linguistics : A Quantitative Survey in Modern Korean

Abstract

To extend the meaning of "functional load" to the volume (or quantity) of function, or the frequency of usage, I named this study "three-dimensional linguistics": because each rule is not flatly in the same volume but differs in the quantity of usage (or occurrence). One may not know the degree of importance and/or plausibility of rules a priori before they are measured in the way as I suggest here. I would like to apply this new definition of "functional load" to the field of syntax as well as phonology. After describing the outline of Korean syntactic phenomena in section 2, I would like to present the results of counting their occurrences in a corpus of sentences. Observation, interpretation, and some analysis of data will follow. In measuring syntactic phenomena, we may notice what sorts of rules most frequently occur in a given language. The importance of such an investigation becomes clear when considering pedagogical purposes and machine translation, among other possible fields. For instance, a teacher can set the order of teaching rules of grammar after considering their frequency. And an engineer of machine translation programs can design the most economical processor by applying this result to his/her implementation.