Sublanguage Formulas as Information Units

Abstract

A concern central to any grammar of a language is that of distinguishing those combinations of its elements which constitute the observed sequences. Clearly, not all combinations of elements occur; in English, the phoneme sequence /ls/ does not occur after pause, the word sequence by at here is not an admissible sentence. This redundancy, or departure from equiprobability of occurrence of its elements, is crucial for characterizing language structure, i.e. stating those combinations of its elements which can occur as against those which cannot. Natural language cannot avail itself of any external metalanguage to designate its elements or couch its description; the very possibility of constructing linguistic elements rests on the non-occurrence of various combinations¹. It follows that the description of the occurences of a language can only be given in the same language (as a natural language, e.g. English contains its grammar in English as one of its sublanguages) or in another (as a grammar of French in English). The grammatical description already makes use of the same kinds of elements and of their possibilities of combination which are to be defined. Insofar as language structure is descriptively the resultant of a succession of constraints on possible combinations,² it is essential that grammatical statement of each restriction not contribute to the redundancy it attempts to characterize.³