On the Functional Load of Syntactic Phenomena in Three-dimensional Linguistics
To extend the meaning of "functional load " to the volume (or quantity) of function, or the frequency of usage, I named thi s study "three-dimensional lingui sti cs": because each rule is not flatl y 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 rule s a priori before they are measured in the way as I suggest here. I would like to apply thi s new definition of "functional load" to the field of syntax as well as phonology. After describing the outline of Korean syntactic phenomena in secti on 2, I would like to present the result s of counting their occurrences in a corpus of sentences. Observation, inter­ pretation, 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 in vestigation becomes clear when considering pedagogical purposes and machine translation , among oth er possible field s. For in stance, a teacher can set the order of teaching rul es of grammar after considering their frequency . And an engineer of machine translation programs can design the most economical processor by applying this result to hi s/her implementation.