Three Kinds of Korean Reflexives : A Corpus Linguistic Investigation on Grammar and Usage

This paper discusses the relationship between grammar as linguistic knowledge, as envisaged in Generative Grammar, and usage, the result of performance. In concrete, I analyze the use of Korean reflexives icaki l, 'casin, and 'cakicasin' by examining the occurrences of these reflexives in a 5-million-word Korean corpus, taken from a 10-million-word Korean corpus which is called "KOREA-1 Corpus" compiled at Korea University (H. Kim and B. Kang 1996). This corpus is composed of various genres of Korean texts including 10% of spoken material. From the KWIC concordance of accusative forms of these reflexives, 'cakilul, 'casin-ur, and 'cakicasin-ur, I examined whether a reflexive has a local antecedent or a long-distance antecedent. The result is that 'caki' is almost even in having local and long-distance antecedents, but 'casin' has more and 'cakicasin' has much more local antecedents. I also examined the thematic roles of the local antecedents of reflexives, which shows that 'casin' has relatively more Experiencer antecedents than icaki` has, although in both cases Agent antecedents dominate. The outcome of these frequency analysis suggests that a tendency (probably not grammaticalized yet), or degree of "naturalness" is real and can be captured in the usage data provided that we have a sizable amount of material manageable in an efficient way as provided by the corpus linguistic method of the present day.