On The Economy Of Language In The Variation Of Chinese Telephone Conversation

People always want to use the most economical language to achieve the most effective communicational ends in their pragmatic behaviors. So economy is always regarded as one of the most ubiquitous principles or'phenomena in all fields of people's life. The phenomenon of simplicity in language and linguistic communication is usually termed as "Principle of Economy". In order to save on the strength to achieve the most effect, people always make an arrangement for their use of language, trying to use the most economical units which are easier, shorter or more universal. In fact, the tendency of economy is closely related with people's cognitive ability and habits. Just because of the inner tendency of language economy, variation phenomena often occur in people's verbal communication.Language variation phenomena exist commonly in people's use of language. The present thesis will have a discovery and identification of the linguistic variations in Chinese phone language and an explanation of these variation phenomena by the principle of language economy in order to find out how the cognitive pursuit for "language economy" affect the choice of phone languages. Although there are superficial factors of language variation and change such as social factors, psychological factors, the mental tendency of using economical language has the inner constraint on the variation and provides the cognitive explanations for language variation and change phenomena. Through the corpus, we find that the participants on the phone have achieved their most communicative effect with the least utterance input. This kind of effectiveness is mainly realized by the means of the omission of some 'unnecessary' elements. The language economy in phone opening variation is embodied by the omission of summon-answer sequence, the omission of the identification-recognition sequence, or the omission of greeting sequence or initial inquiries. The language economy in phone closing variation is embodied by the omission of topic bounding sequence, the omission of closing sequence or the omission of pre-closing sequence and closing sequence. The study of language economy in the variation of Chinese telephone conversations provides another perspective (cognitive) for the research of language variation and change. On the other hand, it is meaningful and practical for the participants to utter more economical language in those pragmatic behaviors to realize their successful communication.There are 6 chapters in this thesis. Chapter 1 provides a general introduction of the research and explains the rationality and necessities of it. Chapter 2 is a literature review of telephone conversations research in present years. In chapter 3, the paper has a general explanation of phone variation from the perspective of language economy. Here, the important theory background "Language Economy" is referred as the theoretical support. And there is also an introduction of the basic research method and data collection in this part. Chapter 4 and chapter 5 are the main bodies of this paper that give a concrete analysis of the opening and closing of Chinese phone variants from the economy of language. Chapter 6 makes a conclusion remarks and a summarization for the major findings. At the same time, it points out the limitations in the present thesis.