Table 1. Contents of the Corpora Two principles are involved in the research method used in this paper. The first is related to the corpus of data, and the second is related to the method of analysis. Given that this paper is focused on the frequency of different morphemes in modern Korean, the corpus should cover all of the genres of language use found in modern (the twentieth century) Korean, but this is not only impossible from a logistical point of view, it is also an inefficient use of resources. To overcome this problem and achieve the stated goals of the research by minimal-but-meaningful investigation, the corpus was designed to include a balance of various representative genres of language use. A larger corpus is more valid than a smaller corpus, so every effort was made to use a valid-size corpus in this pilot study done by a single scholar. The corpus for this small-scale research consisted of 100,000 tokens. These tokens can be either a single word or a “nominal plus particle(s)” or a “verbal stem plus ending(s)” and be called a “orthographic word.” The choice of subcomponents (“sub-corpora”) to include in the corpus is also critical to developing a valid research design. frequency levd of rank grammatical patterns rank grammatical patterns rank grammatical patterns frequency level of nk grammatical patterns List 5. Prefinal Endings Listed by the Alphabetical Order List 5 above reveals the ranking and frequency of appearance of pre-final verbal endings. The high frequency of the past tense morpheme “ot” is the most noticeable feature of the list. If the other two forms of the past tense morpheme (“yot” and “at”) are included, the past tense morpheme makes up 72% of all pre-final verbal endings. This result could have come from the type of texts in the corpus. This is particularly true because the Genesis from the Bible, newspaper articles and TV news, which most refer to past events, take a large portion in the corpus. However, if real language use is considered, references to past events are one of the most common and basic features of Korean language use. List 6. Final Endings Listed by the Korean Alphabetical Order List 6 above shows the frequency of final verbal endings. No distinction was made between conclusive and non-conclusive final endings, so the list could have been divided into two separate lists. In that case, however, additional analysis of endings, such as “ko,” “ke,” and “na,” that do fit easily into either category would have been necessary. Given that this paper focuses on the use of morphemes in Korean education, it is worth mentioning that non-conclusive final endings are usually much more frequent than conclusive ones. Quantitative Research on Suffixes and Grammatical Pattems in Present-day Korean 279 List 7. Grammatical Patterns Listed by Frequency Order Quantitative Research on Suffixes and Grammatical Pattems in Present-day Korean 283 side of the page indicates the frequency of appearance. List 7 raises a number of issues regarding the method of adopting and ordering grammatical patterns for Korean textbooks. One of the most prominent issues is the items that are ranked as low frequency. Of the 353 items, 79 do not appear in textbooks at all, and 110 appear five times or less. Adopting these items early in a pedagogical syllabus thus lowers the validity of the syllabus. That items of such low frequency appear in current Korean textbooks indicates that the materials contain expressions that are removed from real language or that reflect translations from the source language. In addition, in the case of items that appear frequently, an awareness of the order of frequency of verbal endings and grammatical patterns is necessary in developing effective materials. To improve the effectiveness of materials, items that appear a 100 times or more should be classified as “group 1,” those that appear 50-99 times as “group 2,” those that appear 10-49 times as “group 3,” and those that appear less than 9 times as “group 4.” This type of classification scheme allows for the creation of an objective standard that all grammatical syllabi can follow without sacrificing creativity.
