The Control Tower Language: A Case Study of A Specialized Language-in-Action

Abstract

A methodology is presented by which the constraint imposed upon a sublanguage by linguistic and non-linguistic factors is estimated. The asymptotic redundancy associated with the control tower language, when the materials analyzed were predicted letter sequences, was estimated to be 75 per cent compared to 55 per cent for newspaper text. The average constraint imposed upon the selection of message units by the physical situation was estimated to be approximately 82 per cent. When the interaction of situational and linguistic constraints is considered, the estimated redundancy for the language-in-action is increased to 95 per cent.