ABSTRACT
The current notion of a sublanguage of a natural language has developed through studies of texts in specialized fields, particularly technical and scientific texts. The practicality of computerized information retrieval and automatic translation of certain sublanguage texts depends on the simplified structure of these sublanguages compared with the structure of the language as a whole. They were not constructed as formal languages but grew through the use of a natural language for communication in limited fields. One way of viewing the structure of a sublanguage is, then, in terms of the structure of the natural language of which it is a part. This paper examines sublanguage structure in terms of restrictions on and deviations from the structure of the natural language. These restrictions and deviations may be lexical, syntactic, or semantic and may involve discourse structure as well as sentence structure. In addition to providing a means for describing the sublanguages of a natural language, the point of view adopted here provides insight into the properties of the natural language itself.
