  Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal
system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real
language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and
the findings of many psychological experiments have suggested that language may
be more a probabilistic system than a formal system, and thus cannot be
faithfully modeled with the either/or rules of formal linguistic theory. The
present study, based on authentic language data, confirmed that those important
linguistic issues, such as linguistic universal, diachronic drift, and language
variations can be translated into probability and frequency patterns in parole.
These findings suggest that human language may well be probabilistic systems by
nature, and that statistical may well make inherent properties of human
languages.
