ABSTRACT
Sublanguages used for telegraphic communication are viewed as fragmentary versions of the standard language. Thus, a sublanguage grammar is difficult to describe because it must comprise the rules and lexicon of the standard language along with sublanguage options whose occurrence is unpredictable.
Our analysis of the Navy message sublanguage suggests that this view is incorrect. The grammar we propose describes the gapped object, passive, and middle verb data that is characteristic of telegraphic messages. The core of this description is a sublanguage-specific constraint that allows verbs to be transitive or intransitive but not both. If the rules that describe our data presuppose this constraint, the result is a more accurate and simpler grammar than one that assumes these data to be fragments of the standard language. The mechanisms we propose for the sublanguage grammar are (a) independent of Standard English, and (b) interdependent. This situation argues that we view a telegraphic sublanguage as a complete system rather than a fragmented version of the standard language.
