Functional treatment of HAIKU and its application to language education

In this paper we propose a functional treatment of HAIKU. HAIKU is a typical Japanese simple poetic sentence that can convey abundant messages in a very simple concise form 5-7-5 letters. HAIKU-like simple writing style is now spreading all over the world and in many countries people write Haiku to express their thought in a beautifully concise style. Thus we think HAIKU can be a good base-line of sentence for language education. In order to treat the syntax and semantics of HAIKU-like simple sentences, we propose a functional grammar FG. In our FG, every sentence is regarded as the compositional outcome from kernel sentence and meta-sentence. Meta-sentence can be understood as a sentence structuring operator, while kernel sentence is treated as a simple structured, mono-predicate sentence. Using these two categories of sentence, we can explain clearly the semantics and syntax of Haiku, and at the same time, a new method of language education. Meta-sentence gives some strong clue for constructing sentence that is simple but pregnant with rich meaning. We will show interesting examples of meta-sentences obtained from HAIKU.