Economy Of Scientific Article: Intentionality And Pragmatic Strategiy

Linguistic economy and pragmatic strategy have long been the focuses in the field of pragmatics. Since George Kingsley Zipf made a first and definite introduction to the Least Effort Principle in 1940, numerous scholars have approached linguistic economy from different perspectives. The available linguistic and pragmatic theories mainly discuss linguistic economy based on Zipf's Least Effort Principle. Least effort or economy is only a relative concept. Least effort is unnecessarily interlocutors'primary communicative intention. There are numerous cases in which some complicated linguistic choices are preferred instead of least effort choices. Least Effort Principle is not an effective and reasonable standard for the evaluation of pragmatic economy. No systematic standard and method for the interpretation and apprehension of linguistic economy have been shared in the field of linguistics because of the complexity of linguistic economy. In addition, the integration of pragmatic strategy and economy is relatively neglected.What is more, the available studies of pragmatic strategy mainly focus on common communication. No systematic study has been conducted of pragmatically economical strategies for scientific articles, to the author's knowledge. Therefore, based on an overview of related theories, this dissertation discusses the pragmatically economic strategies for scientific articles by constructing a hierarchical intentional model.This dissertation begins with a comprehensive study of existing theories about linguistic economy, pragmatic strategies and intentionality, followed by defining pragmatic economy and hierarchical intention network of scientific article. A scientific discourse is an interlocking hierarchical intention network, in which primary and subsidiary communicative intentions constitute the longitudes, and explicit, implicit and interactive communicative intentions the woofs. Pragmatic economy of scientific discourse is defined as indefinite appropriacy of a discourse to scientific community under the guidance of hierarchical intention network of scientific discourse. The pragmatically economical strategies in scientific articles are the relative optimal ways in which the hierarchical intention network of a discourse could be constructed. Therefore, the analysis of pragmatically economical strategies is in essence the deconstruction of how the intention network of scientific article is effectively formed.On the basis of the division of intentions, the pragmatically economic strategies in scientific articles falls into three division --- explicit, implicit and interactive strategies. The explicit strategies include macro-structure strategy, information manipulation strategy, source-shift strategy, themantic organization strategy and metapragmatic framing strategy. The implicit strategies consist of pragmatic inference and knowledge structure strategy. The interactive strategy includes persuasive stylistic strategy which could produce psychological hints on readers'minds through the sailience of scientific stylistic features.A quantitative study has been made of those suggested strategies using the corpus of 32 articles in the discipline of Energy and Power Engineering, thus testifying the practicability and feasibility of those suggested strategies and their analytical framework.This dissertation draws a complete picture of pragmatically economic strategies in scientific articles, which will provide some theoretical and practical guidance for scientific writing, teaching, and study. The established corpus of pragmatically economical strategies in scientific articles lays a solid foundation for the integration of qualitative and quantitative study of economy and pragmatic strategy. This corpus also provides some real materials for the study and teaching of scientific writing, which could enhance scientific writers'awareness of pragmatically economical strategies.