Sublanguages _differ from each other, and from the "standard I a n ~ a g e , in their syntactic, semantic, and discourse vrolx:rties. Understanding these differences is important'if -we are to improve our ability to process these sublanguages. We have developed a sen~.'automatic ~ u r e for identifying sublangnage syntact/c usage from a sample of text in the sublanguageWe describe the results of applying this procedure to taree text samples: two sets of medical documents and a set of equipment failure me~ages. .
