The Greek Verbal Network Viewed from a Probabilistic Standpoint 5 they were easily disregarded by Chomsky as irrelevant to his major con- cern—that of syntactical structures, especially at what soon came to be called the deep structure 7. From this point on 8, in many if not most mainstream linguistic circles, numerical language studies have been looked down upon, with the resulting tendency to characterize them as simply «counting exercises» or «mere data collection», representative of a previous generation of linguistic study. However, this is more a reflection of the influence of a particular school of thought, Chomsky’s, on the questions of linguistic investigation, rather than an accurate picture of the situation of the time. Already in 1965, Ivic devoted a chapter of his work on trends in linguistics to what he called mathematical linguistics, in which he discussed quantitative or statistical linguistics 9. Although Ivic saw the closest ties between statistical linguistics and such areas as infor- mation theory and machine translation, other grammarians, especially those with functionalist interests such as Firth, had also continued to study language numerically 10. In fact, the major development of nume- rical language studies, bringing the descriptivist agenda back into the forefront of discussion although this time not as an area in itself but as a methodological basis for linguistic research, has been in the field of cor- pus linguistics 11. Nevertheless, it is only fairly recently that such studies have become recognized, although not widely and in all linguistic circles. 7 In his first major work, Syntactic Structures, Chomsky wrote, «Despite the unde- niable interest and importance of semantic and statistical studies of language, they appear to have no direct relevance to the problem of determining or characterizing the set of grammatical utterances. I think that we are forced to conclude that grammar is autono- mous and independent of meaning, and that probabilistic models give no particular insight into some of the basic problems of syntactic structure» (p. 17). 8 Chomskyan linguistics and its offspring have developed in many different direc- tions, especially in terms of the question of meaning. Some of the recent differences of opinion are chronicled in R.A. Harris, The Linguistics Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); G.J. Huck and J.A. Goldsmith, Ideology and Linguistic Theory: Noam Chomsky and the Deep Structure Debates (London: Routledge, 1995). 9 M. Ivic, Trends in Linguistics (trans. M. Heppell; Janua Linguarum, Series Minor, 42; The Hague: Mouton, 1965), esp. pp. 212-24; cf. J. Whatmough, Language: A Modern Synthesis (New York: New American Library, 1956), pp. 179-97. 10 See M. Stubbs, «British Traditions in Text Analysis: From Firth to Sinclair», in M. Baker, G. Francis and E. Tognini-Bonelli (eds.), Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair (Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1993), pp. 1-33; rev. to include Halliday in M. Stubbs, Text and Corpus Analysis: Computer-Assisted Studies of Language and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 22-50. 11 See G. Leech, «Corpora and Theories of Linguistic Performance», in J. Svartvik (ed.), Directions in Corpus Linguistics: Proceedings of Nobel Symposium 82 Stockholm, 4–8 August 1991 (Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs, 65; Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992), pp. 106-22. Other useful introductions to corpus linguistics, besides those cited above, are J. Sinclair, Corpus, Concordance, Collocation (Describing English Language; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); D. Biber, S. Conrad and R. Reppen, Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Language Structure and Use (Cambridge Approaches to Linguistics; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).