Thursday 26 January 2017

Grammatical Systems Are Probabilistic

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 52):
It is clear by this time that grammatical systems are probabilistic in nature: that, for example, the system of POLARITY in English has to be modelled not simply as ‘positive/negative’ but as ‘positive/negative with a certain probability attached’ (which has been found to be of the order of 0.9 : 0.1).