The Greek Verbal Network Viewed from a Probabilistic Standpoint 27 forms, but essentially argues that choice of verbal aspect is to a large extent, if not entirely, determined by the choice of lexical item. Therefore, the aspectual systems in the Greek verbal network cannot have the status or position in the Greek language that they are given in Porter’s model, but aspectual choice comes only as a latterly or even terminal choice dic- tated by previous lexical choice. The probabilistic results regarding the various corpora as opposed to the whole of the New Testament go some of the way to showing that lexis, at least as it would be influenced by indi- vidual writers and genre, does not have a significant effect upon verbal aspect. This is especially the case since none of the aspectual systems showed significant variance in its probabilities between the sub-corpora and the whole of the New Testament. O’Donnell has also shown in a more detailed study that such holds true 90. The second response sees verbal aspect as dependent upon a variety of other grammatical features, such as voice and mood 91. The contention of Verbal Aspect was that the Greek verbal network has aspect as one of its major system components, and that verbal aspect as a morphologically based semantic system functions largely independently of these other fac- tors. In the rest of this paper, we have tested this theory by analyzing a number of instances where aspectual systems in the Greek verbal network interact with other verbal systems. As the tables discussed below indicate, aspectual choice seems for the most part to be independent of any other set of grammatical choices within the Greek verbal network. Not all of the possible paths through the systemic network have been analyzed, but those that have—all of them concerned with various aspect related systems—tend to confirm this analysis. For each analysis, we first define the parameters of the inter- active systems (they are not necessarily simultaneous choices in the net- work, but are choices that must be made to realize the various semantic features concerned), and then comment upon the possible influences of one on the other, paying particular attention to how choice of verbal aspect may or may not be affected by the other interactive system 92. Distributional statistics for these individual systems in isolation are also 90 See M.B. O’Donnell, «Aspect and Lexis: An Empirical Approach» (forthcoming). 91 See B.M. Fanning, Verbal Aspect in New Testament Greek (OTM; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), esp. pp. 126-96; cf. M. Silva, God, Language and Scripture: Reading the Bible in the Light of General Linguistics (Foundations of Contemporary Interpretation, 4; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990), pp. 111-18; idem, «A Response to Fanning and Porter on Verbal Aspect», in S.E. Porter and D.A. Carson (eds.), Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics: Open Questions in Current Research ( JSNTSup, 80; SNTG, 1; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993), pp. 74-82 (also found in WTJ 54 [1992], pp. 179-83); idem, Explorations in Exegetical Method: Galatians as a Test Case (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1996), pp. 68-79, who especially in his later work entertains Baugh’s ideas (see n. 89 above). 92 See Halliday, «Language as System and Language as Instance», pp. 72-76.