A Study Of The Old Man And The Sea From The Perspective Of Economy Principle

Since publication,The Old Man and the Sea,Ernest Hemingway's masterpiece,has received wide attention and has been a hot topic in the academic research.And numerous scholars have made profound studies from various perspectives.The Economy Principle,also called the Principle of Least Effort,means achieving the maximum effect with the least effort.It is a fundamental principle that guides humans' behaviors and exceptionally important both in the language development,communication and many other fields.It was first put forward by the American linguist and philosopher George Kingsley Zipf in 1949,and later developed into pragmatics.This thesis has taken the Principle of Least Effort of Zipf,Economy Principle of Martinet and Relevance Theory of Sperber and Wilson as the theoretical background.This thesis has made an exploratory study of the economy of the language in The Old Man and the Sea from three levels,which are the lexical,the syntactic and the textual levels.At the lexical level,the thesis has made a study of the language economy of the novel in these aspects: common words,new words,pre-modifiers and conjunctions;at the syntactic level,the thesis has made an analysis of the language economy in the work in the following areas: ellipsis,reference and substitution;at the textual level,the thesis has researched the language economy of the novel from several aspects: recurrence,thematization and linear organization.This thesis' research on the language economy in Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea demonstrates that the novelist's language use in the novel not only shows great economy,high efficiency and fluency,but also confirms to the progress of the story line and fits in with the themes of the novel.This study helps to have a deeper understanding of Ernest Hemingway's unique writing style—“Iceberg Style”,and the reason why he was always trying all means to utilize direct description instead of big words and gorgeous adjectives,and short sentences instead of lengthy sentences in his works.