A Study Of The Economy Principle Of Language In American Sitcom Modern Family

It can not be denied that the development of language is dynamic and changeable constantly. With the rapid pace of the modern life, the tendency of language use is becoming more reduced. Especially, in people’s daily life, they pursue the structural reduction of utterances for expressing their informative and communicative purposes. In recent years, the studies on the Economy Principle have been attracting more attention among the linguistic scholars. The Economy Principle exists in every level of language system(e.g. phonics, lexicon, grammar, syntax,semantics). Thus, it is also regarded as a fundamental principle for guiding people’s communication. It was Zipf who first proposed the Principle of Least Effort, which pointed out that people did things tended to save effort. Then this principle was applied in the linguistic field. A. Martinet first put forward this concept “the Economy Principle of Language”, which was made up of two parts: the principle of least effort and the requirements of communication. People always tend to use the least effort for the largest communicative effects because of human beings’ laziness.After that, Chomsky stressed the importance of this principle, suggesting “economy of representation” and “economy of derivation”. The main idea of this principle is that the speaker and hearer cost less effort and achieve more communicative effects.However, limited with time, situation and other objective factors, the use of Economy Principle in verbal communication is a choice grounded form a series of possible utterances. In other words, the Economy Principle of Language is a relative concept, not absolute.The corpus of this thesis is two episodes which are extracted from Modern Family randomly. In the framework of the Conversational Analysis, combined with the quantitative analysis method, the data is collected, which includes the quantity,types and the units of the turns. The results of the statistics will be presented in the graphs and tables. Based on the statistic results, the pragmatic analysis on theeffective use of the Economy Principle is studied in the framework of the Cognitive Context Theory.This thesis mainly focuses on exploring following three questions:(1)which turn-constructional units reflects the Economy Principle of Language in terms of turn-constructional components in Modern Family?(2)In the turn-taking system(turn-initiating, turn-responding, turn-holding and turn-claiming), how does the Economy Principle of Language distribute in Modern Family?(3)Which pragmatic strategies used in turn-initiating, turn-responding,turn-holding and turn-claiming follow the Economy Principle of Language in Modern Family?There are six parts in this thesis in below:Chapter One mainly introduces the research background, objectives,significance, and methodology of this thesis.Chapter Two is the literature review of this thesis, which presents the birth and the development of this principle in pragmatic field, and current researches on the American sitcoms, especially the corpus in the thesis—Modern Family.Chapter Three shows the theory basis of this thesis: the Conversational Analysis Theory and the Cognitive Context Theory. The units and rules of turn-taking system in CA is appropriate for the objects of this thesis because the corpus of this thesis is the conversations selected from the Modern Family. The Cognitive Context Theory is used for pragmatic analysis and explanation on how the Economy Principle is used effectively and successfully in people’s verbal communications.Chapter Four presents the research methodology of this thesis. The quantitative analysis method is used for analyzing quantity of turns, turn-constructional units which reflect the Economy Principle. The qualitative analysis method is applied for pragmatic analysis how the Economy Principle is used by people effectively. This part also includes the research questions, objectives, purposes and methods.Chapter Five is the major part of this thesis, which shows the results and discussion based above data. In the first part, the author presents the linguisticrealizations and the distribution of Economy Principle in turn-taking system in Modern Family based on the collected data. In the second part, the author mainly discussed which pragmatic strategies used in turn-taking system(turn-initiating,turn-responding, turn-claiming and turn-holding stages) reflect the Economy Principle, and the syntactic features and pragmatic functions of the Economy Principle will be discussed based on the Cognitive Context Theory in this part.Chapter Six is the conclusion of the thesis, which includes the major findings,implications, limitations and suggestions for future studies.Major findings of this thesis are presented as following:(1)The use of Economy Principle exists abundantly in the turn-constructional units. The most frequency is simple sentences, then words, clauses and phrases,which totally take up about 71% of all the turns. The Economy Principle is reflected in the elliptical sentences.(2) In the turn-taking system, turn-responding stage takes the largest proportion,then the turn-initiating,turn-claiming and the last turn-holding stage.(3)In terms of turn-taking strategies: in the turn-initiating strategies, the highest frequency is statement, then nomination, greeting and euphemism. The participants usually initiate a turn with a statement, which is a very direct way. That is a performance of Economy Principle to direct their communicative intentions.In the turn-responding strategies, the number of word, phrase, clause nearly takes up a half percent of all the turns in responding stage. A plenty of elliptical sentences exist in this stage. The Economy Principle is mainly reflected in the use of preferred second part and the backchannels. The possible reason is that, with the proceeding of the conversation, the situation context is much richer in turn-responding stage than other stages. They can follow the Economy Principle to omit some information which is known for them, and stress new information. Then the author explores the economic features of the sentence patterns as following:In the statements, the ellipsis mostly happens at following parts:(1)Omitting “Subject+be ”;(2)Omitting “Subject +predicate”;(3)Omitting Sentence, keeping theadverbials;(4)The situations of only omitting the verbs are seldom, but in the present continuous tense, the word “be” is omitted; In the Questions, General Questions are used by the communicators through omitting auxiliary verbs(do,can,be) and they prefer to choose this pattern “statement+intonation” to realize this function. That can make them needn’t transform the Questions pattern, then saving their processing effort. Wh-questions are always omitted the latter part, only keeping the main wh-words(when,where,why,how). In the second part of the adjacency pairs, the Question tags are used by the speaker through omitting the question part, keeping the tag part; In exclamations, the exclamation patterns of traditional grammars are totally abandoned by the speakers, they prefer to using the nouns and adjectives or phrases to express this function.In the turn-responding strategies, the economy of derivation is also explored,which is in accordance with Horn’s hearer’s economy. That aims at making the hearer understand what the speaker says using relatively less processing effort.Through the case study of Modern Family, the author finds that this principle is reflected in the places of the sentence elements. There are two main phenomena:(1)left-dislocation;(2)reinforcement tag. They can contribute the hearer to understanding the speaker better with less processing effort, and also have functions of helping the speaker stress the important information and express their feelings.In the turn-holding stage, the main strategies are hesitation filler, incomplete marker, utterance incompletor, and speech reception. The linguistic realization of these strategies is small words, which are some function words. The most frequently used is utterance incompletors, then hesitation fillers, the last is speech reception.In turn-claiming stage, insertion is a major way to claim a turn. And the statements are the main linguistic realization of insertion. The communicators use statements to insert a conversation directly in order to express his informative purposes by omitting some euphemism. Another finding is that they usually use the nomination and elliptical questions to imply the functions of persuasion or deny for the timing problems.Practically, this research on the Economy Principle contributes to the learningand teaching of EFL, which makes the EFL learners and teachers pay more attention to the economic feature of language in verbal communications, not only taking the written language as standard and proper English. Mastering the Economy Principle of Language in the aspects of turn-construction, turn-taking strategies can improve the competence of learners’ oral speaking English and understanding ability, thus they can reduce the pragmatic mistakes in verbal communications. Theoretically, this research can enrich the Conversational Analysis Theory, the Cognitive Context Theory, and the Economy Principle of Language, and meanwhile strengthen the explanatory power of these theories.