On The Economy Of Changes In Present-day English

Languages are evolving unceasingly. As a global language, Present-day English(shortened as PdE hereafter) is widely used in all domains of countries like economy,politics, education, science, culture, health and international communications. Like othershuman behaviors, languages evolve according to the economy principle: to gain or conveythe maximal amount of information through the minimal language codes expenditure. Thisthesis studies the economy of changes in PdE at different levels (phonological, lexical,syntactic and pragmatic) and illustrates its role in various English genres.This thesis is made up of seven parts. The first part, above all, sketches Englishdevelopment and its ever-changing nature. Then, it indicates economy as a guiding principleof the PdE development. After that, it states the writing aim, significance and the maincontent of this thesis.The second part is literature review which gives the theoretical background of thisthesis and introduces recent studies on economy.The third and forth parts focus on studies of economy at different levels:(i) Elision,contraction, liaison and assimilation can modify sounds to ensure the fluency of utterances;(ii) People constantly coin new words by means of compounding, conversion, affixation,blending, shortening and back-formation, transfer old words’ meanings and favor smallwords;(iii) Ellipsis used in coordinate constructions and complex sentences abbreviatesentence structure to avoid redundancy;(iv) Omission, presupposition, implicature andintonation used in daily communication embody both explicit and implicit economy inpragmatic sense.The fifth part analyzes economy in advertisements, news and business correspondence,especially the concise wording which saves layout, time and energy.The sixth part demonstrates six motivations of the economy in PdE.The last part is the conclusion of the whole thesis and points out the limitation andaspects for further study.Economy is the fundamental principle of language changing; it runs through variousstages of English development and is embodied in every aspect, namely, phonology, vocabulary, syntax, and pragmatics. Only by fully understanding the economy principle andhow it functions in the latest changes of PdE, can people use English better. This is theconclusion of this thesis.This thesis aims at drawing English learners’ attention to economy and making themconcern about the latest changes in PdE. Hopefully this paper can facilitate and improvepeople’s utilization of Present-day English more economically and provide some referencesfor the future studies on economy.