Science Sublanguages and the Prospects for a Global Language of Science

Scientists have limited access to results published in languages in which they are not fluent. One solution to the problem is suggested by some results of investigation into the nature of language generally and the language of various sciences in particular. The information provided in language is given not only by the meanings of individual words but also by the relations among words, especially by the regularities of their co-occurrence. Particular sciences, furthermore, are characterized by particular sets of such relations among words. These relational structures are shared by discourses within the same scientific field in different languages; these structures can thus be seen as expressing the information carried by language in the field irrespective of national language. Because the informational structures are discoverable in a computable way, the solution suggested here to the problem of international communication in science would at the same time provide facilities for the computer processing and retrieval of scientific information on a large—potentially a global—scale.