earticle

영어

When considering grammatical characteristics of a language, we must focus on properties which are rare or infrequent among the languages over the world. Most of the properties adduced by the so-called theory of (Ural-)Altaic common features, when viewed from modern typological viewpoints, are not confined to (Ural-)Altaic, but can be found in other families and areas. Moreover, many of them are quite common among world languages, so cannot be considered to be evidences of genetic affinity. On the other hand, Korean and Japanese have many properties of the Circum-Pacific Mega Linguistic Area, as well as the Eurasian Mega Linguistic Area. This is due to the fact that these two languages are located between these two Mega Linguistic Areas. In addition to surface properties, we should examine deep factors which influence and give shape to surface properties. Dominance and harmony proposed by Greenberg are good examples of such deep factors.