ABSTRACT
A comparison of the semantic word class co-occurrence patterns in two different domains, a class of Navy messages about shipboard equipment failure and a set of medical discharge summaries, discloses that, despite superficial differences, the sublanguages share semantic relationships among classes of objects. A set of general semantic patterns is proposed. The semantic patterns, which are contextually determined and which represent stereotyped situations, can be considered instances of frames. By sequencing the semantic patterns, scriptal knowledge about discourse structures in a sublanguage can be represented. The domains of discourse of the different sublanguages can be viewed as sister nodes in a generalization/specialization hierarchy of discourse domains. The parent node represents the general domain of system failures. The shared/different semantic patterns of the sublanguage are shown to correspond to the relative positions of the discourse domains in the hierarchy. As supporting evidence, the domain of discourse of an artificial language, IEEE ATLAS programming language (for describing electronic signal failures), has also been placed in the hierarchy; its semantic patterns are a specialization of the patterns of its parent domain (equipment failures).
