On The Economy Of Language In Verbal Communication

This thesis aims at a dynamic study of the economy of language from the perspective of verbal communication. The economy intrinsic to human language has long been recognized and led to a crop of studies on it. However, most, if not all, of the studies were made on the static level of language. Sparked off by Zipf's Principle of Least Effort and previous contributions by some pragmaticians to the study of language use in real situations, the present study asserts that the economy of language can also be studied on the dynamic level, i.e. in the dynamic process of using language. It first detects and finds theoretical evidence and support for the economy of language in verbal communication in Zipf's Principle of Least Effort, Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory, Grice's Cooperative Principle, Horn's Q- and R-principles, Levinson's Q-, I- and M-principles, and so forth. Then, based on these theories and the permanent conflict in verbal communication between communication participants'communicative needs and their tendency to reduce to a minimum their linguistic effort expenditure, the economy of language in verbal communication is described as such: the contribution of linguistic effort is so ideal that in the present context any reduction of the linguistic effort will impair the sufficient actualization of the communicative goal(s); on the one hand, the effort expenditure must be minimal or no more than necessary; on the other hand, the communicative needs must be actualized. These two conditions are indispensable and should be satisfied simultaneously. In other words, communication participants will save their linguistic effort as much as they can if and only if the optimal efficiency or utility of the linguistic units employed in verbal communication can be secured. And then the study makes an exemplification of the economy of language in verbal communication; later on it proposes a typology of linguistic economy in verbal communication: the explicit economy and the implicit economy; further, it dedicates due detail to discriminating among implicit economy, overinformativeness, and redundancy; last, an investigation is made into the causes, constraining factors and the process of attaining the right interpretation of the linguistic economy in verbal communication. The present research presents a comparatively panoramic view of the economy of language in verbal communication. It is significant in that it sheds some light on our understanding of language, provides some new insights into the economy of language, offers some useful guides for efficient communication, and benefits language teaching and learning.