Economy (linguistics)

Last updated

The economy principle in linguistics, also known as linguistic economy, is a functional explanation of linguistic form. It suggests that the organization of phonology, morphology, lexicon and syntax is fundamentally based on a compromise between simplicity and clarity, two desirable but to some extent incompatible qualities. The more distinctive elements that a language has, for example, phonemes or functional markers, the more it will promote hearer-easiness. This, however, occurs on the expense of the speaker, who must make a greater effort to convey a message. An economic solution yields good communicative value without excessive time and energy costs. [1]

Contents

The word 'economy' derives from Greek oikòs ('house') and nomòs (from némein, 'to deliver'). The notion of good household management is transferred metaphorically from a social to a linguistic level where it represents a force maintaining systemic equilibrium. The same principle—a compromise between gain and cost—also applies to biological systems. [1] However, functional linguistics does not consider itself to be a part of evolutionary biology, but both as belonging to systems theory, [2] and both as being governed by the logic of trade-off. In linguistics, the economy principle suggests that language change cannot make languages exceedingly difficult to produce or process, predicting that the constant changes that are natural to language, despite appearing to have a deteriorating effect, ultimately do not make languages less suited for intercommunication.

Definitions

The standard concept of economy, or, the "classical definition", was published by André Martinet in his Économie des changements phonétiques (1955). Martinet studied the manifestations of economy in phonology and syntax and defined it as the unstable balance between the needs of communication—which are always changing—and natural human inertia, two essential forces contributing to the optimization of the linguistic system. [1]

Previous definitions included the principle of least effort as discussed by Joseph Vendryes (1939) and George Kingsley Zipf (1949). Two contradicting principles of 'economy' were first recognized by Henry Sweet (1888). By contrast, William Dwight Whitney (1875) had discussed linguistic economy before him, but only as relates to the single principle of parsimony. Georg von der Gabelentz (1901) did not use the term but identified two conflicting desiderata in grammar: comfort of the speaker, and clarity, which favors the addressee. [3] Other terms for economy include competing motivations, the homeostatic principle, and the mechanical principle (William Labov). Another similar concept is Martin Haspelmath's form–frequency correspondence, which argues that more frequent forms are unmarked and therefore shorter than the less frequent forms, which are marked and longer. These premises create "a balance between parsimony and clarity", promoting efficiency of communication in terms of production and processing. [4]

Other uses

The word economy has been used in different ways in linguistics and sometimes only refers to parsimony (or notational parsimony, e.g., Louis Hjelmslev). Grammatical efficiency (John A. Hawkins) is another single-principle concept relating to sentence processing; and economy in generative grammar refers simultaneously to notational parsimony and syntactic processing. In John Haiman's competing motivations of economy and iconicity, economy alone is the single principle of parsimony and, thus, distinct from Martinet's economy.

Empirical evidence

A review of studies carried out in diachronic and sociolinguistics found that, while language change is frequently the matter of the deletion of word endings, for example—which often contain grammatical elements—a disambiguation across the linguistic levels is also taking place. Despite being critical of functionalism, Labov considered these two opposing forces as indispensable to explain meaning-preservance in linguistic change. He named three subtypes of meaning-preservation. [5]

However, Labov points out that meaning-preservation does not necessarily employ push-chains and pull-chains (as it did in the great vowel shift, for instance) and that functional decay is commonplace in language change. Much of the disambiguation occurs indirectly as a reaction to an already occurred change that has increased ambiguity. Children, when learning their language, perform a reanalysis of it based on their experiences of misunderstanding and are inclined to reject the old form that is homonymous with the new form. According to historical linguist Anthony Kroch,

"If the progress of an earlier change, like the loss of case marking, leads to a greater tendency for the older form to be misunderstood, no matter how small the tendency, there will be a gradual shift, generation after generation, toward the newer form." [6]

This explains, for example, why the loss of grammatical cases did not make English more ambiguous.[ citation needed ]

Criticism

In the context of a long-lasting descriptivism versus prescriptivism debate, there has been much skepticism of logical and functional arguments, the latter of which are defined as arguments utilizing prescriptive norms “to avoid ambiguity, misunderstanding, redundancy, etc.”. [7] The problem, according to sociolinguists James Milroy and Lesley Milroy, is that non-linguists participating in the social construction of the linguistic norm are not sufficiently informed about the discriminatory aspects of standardization based on such purportedly objective criteria. The evaluation of what is acceptable in language should therefore be left to the professionals, who employ research-based criteria. It is widely accepted among academic linguists that descriptive linguistics is the scientific enterprise that guides educational authorities to the correct policies, resulting in greater social equality. [8]

In theoretical linguistics, Labov is critical of the idea that functional change is based on the speech community's desire to improve their language. Therefore, he proposes renaming the force of maintaining meaning as a "mechanical" principle, reflecting the subconscious nature of language change.

William Croft argues that the whole concept of the functionality of the language system, including economy, is mistaken because language is an autonomous function of the mind and immune to the external factors of communication. According to Croft, the time span of linguistic change is longer than the life of an individual, so he or she cannot be responsible for it. Conversely to Labov, Croft proposes maintaining the term functional explanation but redefining it as an argument against the idea that "form follows function". [9]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ferdinand de Saussure</span> Swiss linguist and philosopher (1857–1913)

Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics and one of two major founders of semiotics, or semiology, as Saussure called it.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Functional linguistics</span> Approach to linguistics

Functional linguistics is an approach to the study of language characterized by taking systematically into account the speaker's and the hearer's side, and the communicative needs of the speaker and of the given language community. Linguistic functionalism spawned in the 1920s to 1930s from Ferdinand de Saussure's systematic structuralist approach to language (1916).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Language</span> Structured system of communication

Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing. Human language is characterized by its cultural and historical diversity, with significant variations observed between cultures and across time. Human languages possess the properties of productivity and displacement, which enable the creation of an infinite number of sentences, and the ability to refer to objects, events, and ideas that are not immediately present in the discourse. The use of human language relies on social convention and is acquired through learning.

The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to linguistics:

In the study of language, description or descriptive linguistics is the work of objectively analyzing and describing how language is actually used by a speech community.

In linguistics, transformational grammar (TG) or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is part of the theory of generative grammar, especially of natural languages. It considers grammar to be a system of rules that generate exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language and involves the use of defined operations to produce new sentences from existing ones.

Historical linguistics, also known as diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of how languages change over time. It seeks to understand the nature and causes of linguistic change and to trace the evolution of languages. Historical linguistics involves several key areas of study, including the reconstruction of ancestral languages, the classification of languages into families,(comparative linguistics) and the analysis of the cultural and social influences on language development.

Principles and parameters is a framework within generative linguistics in which the syntax of a natural language is described in accordance with general principles and specific parameters that for particular languages are either turned on or off. For example, the position of heads in phrases is determined by a parameter. Whether a language is head-initial or head-final is regarded as a parameter which is either on or off for particular languages. Principles and parameters was largely formulated by the linguists Noam Chomsky and Howard Lasnik. Many linguists have worked within this framework, and for a period of time it was considered the dominant form of mainstream generative linguistics.

In linguistics, linguistic competence is the system of unconscious knowledge that one knows when they know a language. It is distinguished from linguistic performance, which includes all other factors that allow one to use one's language in practice.

In linguistics and social sciences, markedness is the state of standing out as nontypical or divergent as opposed to regular or common. In a marked–unmarked relation, one term of an opposition is the broader, dominant one. The dominant default or minimum-effort form is known as unmarked; the other, secondary one is marked. In other words, markedness involves the characterization of a "normal" linguistic unit against one or more of its possible "irregular" forms.

Two types of language change can be characterized as linguistic drift: a unidirectional short-term and cyclic long-term drift.

In historical linguistics, grammaticalization is a process of language change by which words representing objects and actions become grammatical markers. Thus it creates new function words from content words, rather than deriving them from existing bound, inflectional constructions. For example, the Old English verb willan 'to want', 'to wish' has become the Modern English auxiliary verb will, which expresses intention or simply futurity. Some concepts are often grammaticalized, while others, such as evidentiality, are not so much.

In the field of linguistics, syntactic change is change in the syntactic structure of a natural language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joan Bybee</span> American linguist

Joan Lea Bybee is an American linguist and professor emerita at the University of New Mexico. Much of her work concerns grammaticalization, stochastics, modality, morphology, and phonology. Bybee is best known for proposing the theory of usage-based phonology and for her contributions to cognitive and historical linguistics.

Structural linguistics, or structuralism, in linguistics, denotes schools or theories in which language is conceived as a self-contained, self-regulating semiotic system whose elements are defined by their relationship to other elements within the system. It is derived from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and is part of the overall approach of structuralism. Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916, stressed examining language as a dynamic system of interconnected units. Saussure is also known for introducing several basic dimensions of semiotic analysis that are still important today. Two of these are his key methods of syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis, which define units syntactically and lexically, respectively, according to their contrast with the other units in the system. Other key features of structuralism are the focus on systematic phenomena, the primacy of an idealized form over actual speech data, the priority of linguistic form over meaning, the marginalization of written language, and the connection of linguistic structure to broader social, behavioral, or cognitive phenomena.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Linguistics is based on a theoretical as well as a descriptive study of language and is also interlinked with the applied fields of language studies and language learning, which entails the study of specific languages. Before the 20th century, linguistics evolved in conjunction with literary study and did not employ scientific methods. Modern-day linguistics is considered a science because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language – i.e., the cognitive, the social, the cultural, the psychological, the environmental, the biological, the literary, the grammatical, the paleographical, and the structural.

Panchronic phonology is an approach to historical phonology. Its aim is to formulate generalizations about sound changes that are independent of any particular language or language group.

In sociolinguistics, the curvilinear principle states that there is a tendency for linguistic change from below to originate from members of the central classes in a speech community's socioeconomic hierarchy, rather than from the outermost or exterior classes.

In linguistics, the autonomy of syntax is the assumption that syntax is arbitrary and self-contained with respect to meaning, semantics, pragmatics, discourse function, and other factors external to language. The autonomy of syntax is advocated by linguistic formalists, and in particular by generative linguistics, whose approaches have hence been called autonomist linguistics.

Sonia Cristofaro is a linguist at Sorbonne University who specializes in linguistic typology and subordination.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Vicentini, Alessandra (2003). "The economy principle in language. Notes and observations from early modern English grammars". Mots. Words. Palabras. 3: 37–57. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.524.700 . Retrieved 2023-06-03.
  2. ↑ Daneš, František (2003). "The double basis of the Prague functional approach". Language and Function: To the Memory of Jan Firbas. John Benjamins. pp. 57–70. ISBN   9027215588 . Retrieved 2023-06-03.
  3. ↑ MacWhinney, Brian; Mal'čukov., Andrej; Moravcsik, Edith (2014). Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage. OUP. Retrieved 2023-06-03.
  4. ↑ Haspelmath, Martin (2021). "Explaining grammatical coding asymmetries: Form–frequency correspondences and predictability" (PDF). Journal of Linguistics. 57 (3): 605–633. doi:10.1017/S0022226720000535. S2CID   234127039 . Retrieved 2023-06-08.
  5. ↑ Labov, William (1994). Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume 1: Internal Factors. Wiley. ISBN   978-0-631-17914-6.
  6. ↑ Kroch, Anthony (1989). "Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change" (PDF). Language Variation and Change. 1 (3): 199–244. doi:10.1017/S0954394500000168. S2CID   13832469 . Retrieved 2023-06-03.
  7. ↑ Richards, Elizabeth A. (2019). Grassroots prescriptivism in below-the-line comments of The Pedant (MA). University of Leiden. Retrieved 2023-10-01.
  8. ↑ Milroy, James; Milroy, Lesley (2012). LAuthority in Language: Investigating Standard English. Routledge. ISBN   9780415696838.
  9. ↑ Croft, William (1995). "Autonomy and functionalist linguistics". Language. 71 (3): 490–532. doi:10.2307/416218. JSTOR   416218.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.