The Greek Verbal Network Viewed from a Probabilistic Standpoint 13 assigning a probability to each potential outcome (either A or B). If it is equally likely that either outcome will occur, then each will be given a pro- bability of 0.5. If outcome A is expected to occur 9 times out of every ten choices, then A will be assigned a probability of 0.9 and B will be one minus the probability of A, thus 1 - 0.9 = 0.1. These probabilities should not be viewed as operating in a predictive manner, in saying «the next choi- ce should be A with odds of nine to one», but rather as providing an inter- pretative framework for choices once they have been made 45. Consider system X, in which the probabilities of outcomes A and B are 0.9 and 0.1 respectively—that is, A is nine times more likely to occur than B—if B is chosen, then we can define B not only as «not A», but «not A against odds of nine to one». These probabilities not only provide information about general patterns of grammatical features within a language, but they can also be used to help define the semantics of these features. In the introduction we noted the influence of Chomsky’s syntactical theory upon linguistics in the past nearly forty years, and particularly how his negative view of probabilistic modelling has discredited the use of numerical methods in theoretical linguistics. In addition, his restatement of Saussure’s langue and parole distinction in terms of linguistic compe- tence and linguistic performance has resulted in the consignment of data obtained from real texts to the realm of applied linguistics, while theore- tical linguistics has concerned itself with logical and theoretical concepts such as grammaticality 46. De Beaugrande has counted the number of sen- tences which are found in Chomsky’s early works, Syntactic Structures and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, and found that «only twenty-eight inven- ted sentences in SS [Syntactic Structures] and twenty-four in AT [Aspects of the Theory of Syntax] are analysed» 47. It is not therefore surprising that Chomsky not only rejected the value of naturally occurring language for the study of syntactic structure, but concluded that «probabilistic models» could bring little insight to this task 48. In his work, Halliday rejects the Saussurian langue–parole dualism, and especially Chomsky’s competence–performance division, and instead offers 45 Halliday, «Corpus Studies and Probabilistic Grammar», pp. 32-33. 46 A standard introduction to theoretical linguistics is J. Lyons, Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). An examina- tion of this work fails to uncover a single textual example larger than the individual sentence, and all of these examples are invented instead of being drawn from texts or instances of speech. As Stubbs indicates, another influential work by Lyons, his two volume Semantics (2 vols.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), does not «analyse a single authentic text or text fragment» (Stubbs, Text and Corpus Analysis, p. 30). 47 De Beaugrande, Linguistic Theory, p. 176. Halliday suggests that «Chomsky’s sar- castic observation that “I live in New York is more frequent than I live in Dayton Ohio” was designed to demolish the conception that relative frequency in text might have any theoretical significance» («Corpus Studies and Probabilistic Grammar», p. 30). 48 Chomsky, Syntactic Structures, p. 17.