Identifying patterns in linguistic behaviour

The patterning oflinguistic behaviour has long been noted. Whorf, for example, pointed to patterns or \u27fashions of speaking\u27 that distinguish language families - Standard Average European (SAE) and American Indian languages such as Hopi (Whorf 1956). Through his analysis of the way in which the linguistic categories of Hopi by comparison with those of Standard Average European languages analyse reality, Whorf concluded that concepts such as those of \u27time\u27 and \u27matter\u27 are not given in substantially the same form by experience to all men but depend upon the nature of the language or languages through the use of which they have been developed. They do not depend so much upon any one system (e.g. tense or nouns) within the grammar as upon the ways of analysing and reporting experience which have become fixed in the language as integrated \u27fashions of speaking\u27 ... (Whorf 1956:158). Whorf\u27s conclusions that \u27language fashions society\u27 resulted from his study of the grammatical systems of these two contrasting language families (SAE and Hopi). The investigation of the occurrence of patterns in language use - of language instance as opposed to language potential - reported here (and as theorised by Bernstein e.g. 1971) has revealed the apparently irreconcilable fact that \u27society fashions language\u27. How these two positions may be reconciled will be addressed presently. First, however, the way in which some patterns of actual linguistic behaviours have been investigated using multi-variate statistical procedures will be outlined. The starting point of such a

Semantic networks: the description of linguistic meaning in SFL

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