Economy In Language And Language Evolution

The theory of evolution is commonly accepted in today's academic world. Herbert Spencer, one of the early proponents of the evolutionary theory, formulated the principle of evolution as"survival of the fittest"(Spencer 1868: 444) after reading Charles Darwin's treatise On the Origin of Species in which evolution is seen as a process of natural selection and adaptation. In order to get a better chance of survival, a principle of economy is adhered to by all living organisms:"…natural selection is continually trying to economize in every part of the organization."(Darwin 1859: 134) The principle of economy requires exerting the least effort to get the most returns, i.e. minimizing the effort for a given return or maximizing returns for a given input. So economy in this dissertation is formulated as a"minimization-maximization"opposition and unification. Human beings, as we all know, are the dominant species on this planet of Earth after a long period of co-evolution with other species. And adherence to the principle of economy is also one of the characteristics shared by all human behaviors. Human natural language, as the commonest and most frequent human behavior, must also reveal this characteristic. Economy of language or linguistic economy has been approached from two perspectives in academic studies: one views language as a factor in the economic systems of a district, a country or still larger institutions (language, in this approach, is often viewed as an asset or part of the human capital). This approach is now widely taken in the discipline called"economics of language", a relatively young interdisciplinary field of academic inquiry. The other approach studies economy in language. In this approach, language is believed to be economically organized itself. This is also the approach taken in this dissertation. Before exploring linguistic economy in detail, this dissertation conducts a survey of phenomena of economy in physical nature, general human behavior, human cognition and human natural language, for the purpose of providing a unified picture of phenomena of economy in the world. Then this dissertation studies linguistic economy embodied at various facets of language. Subjects like phonetic and phonological economy, lexical and semantic economy, morphological and syntactic economy, textual and discourse economy, and pragmatic economy are explored in this dissertation. Since human natural language has experienced long processes of evolution, the role of linguistic economy in language evolution is also discussed in this dissertation. This dissertation employs a unified theoretical framework, namely, the economic approach, proposed by the economist Gary S. Becker to explicate the mechanisms of linguistic economy. This economic approach, as put by Becker (1976: 5), features stable preferences, the maximizing behavior and market equilibrium. Though not without disapprovals, this framework is believed to be applicable to behaviors out of the range of traditional subjects of economic studies like productive and consumptive sectors in a market. Finally, this dissertation discusses the seeming counter-examples of linguistic economy and gives explanations for them.