Stanley E. Porter and Matthew Brook O’Donnell 10 In this article, we build on the theoretical work by Porter in Verbal Aspect in the Greek of the New Testament that systemically analyzed the Greek verbal network, focusing particularly on the morphological fea- tures of tense-form and mood. Presenting his findings in terms of marked- ness theory, he introduced, but did not pursue in the kind of detail currently achievable, the area of distributional markedness 32. In this study, we take the systemic verbal network developed in Verbal Aspect 33 and add frequency information to the systems, both individually (for example the ASPECTUALITY system) and in combination (for example FI- NITENESS and ASPECT1). We test our findings against Halliday’s hypotheses about the two main types of system in language, and his viewpoint on language as both a system and an instance (see below). We also present a tentative analysis of the voice-system in Greek from a distributional standpoint, pending future work on voice 34. The study demonstrates the integration of empirical and theoretical linguistic analysis, and aims to provide a suggestive paradigm for future numerical studies of the Greek of the New Testament. 2. Theory: Probabilistic Lexicogrammar Recent work by Halliday has stressed the fact that grammar is «inherently probabilistic» 35. He contends that this has always been his view, but that the counting and analysis of sufficient amounts of lin- guistic data has only recently become available with the advent of affordable computer equipment, and, more importantly, access to machine readable corpora 36. He is somewhat mystified by the fact that linguists are comfortable with the counting of words (lexical items) and with assigning probabilities of occurrence to these words, but they often object when the same task is attempted for grammati- 32 See Porter, Verbal Aspect, pp. 178-81, esp. p. 181. 33 See Porter, Verbal Aspect, p. 109. 34 See S.E. Porter, Voice in the Greek of the New Testament (in preparation). 35 Halliday, «Language as System and Language as Instance», p. 65. 36 In a 1961 article, Halliday stated that «It is not simply that all grammar can be sta- ted in probability terms, based on frequency counts in texts: this is due to the nature of a text as a sample. But the very fact that we can recognize primary and secondary struc- tures—that there is a scale of delicacy at all—shows that the nature of language is not to operate with relations of “always this and never that”» (M.A.K. Halliday, «Categories of the Theory of Grammar», Word 17 [1961], pp. 241-92, quotation p. 259; repr. in Halliday: System and Function, pp. 52-72, quotation p. 63). Elsewhere he observes that: «It seemed to me clear in 1960 that useful theoretical work in grammar was seriously hampered by lack of data; we depended on the corpus as a resource for further advance. Moreover it would have to be computerized, in the sense that some part of the work would be performed computationally to permit large-scale frequency studies» (Halliday, «Language as System and Language as Instance», p. 64).