From Structure to Information

Abstract

The special structures of sublanguage and discourse, within language, are of interest because their informational interpretation is different and sharper than the informational interpretation of the whole language. Since the problem of identifying the antibody-producing cells has been resolved in the papers investigated here, we know in retrospect how the papers differed in respect to their information about this problem. This difference can then be compared with the papers’ differences in grammatical structure, to see if there is a controlled method of making an informational interpretation of the grammatical structure of sublanguage material. It will be seen in section 1 that differences in word classes and in sentence formulas appear where there are known differences in information or in opinion. This correlation suggests that one can indeed judge the information on the basis of the structure, and it indicates how the structure points to the information. Any relations established in such controlled conditions should prove applicable in less controlled situations, such as in investigating ongoing research, where our informational judgement about an article is less definite (see section 2 below).