Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background of the Research
Language is a kind of social phenomenon, and its generation follows theformation of human society. Language varies according to the changes of human’ssocial life. The modern society is developing and changing rapidly. Therefore, manyvariations happen to the language which we use in our daily lives. However, a lot ofpotential rules and characteristics also exist in these variations. These variations arethe vitality of language. Exploring these variations can motivate the development oflanguage field. That is the reason, in lately years, the tendency of the use oflanguage is quick and easy, especially in the daily conversations. The verbalcommunication is brief and more efficient. The use of the language does not followthe strict rules of grammar, that is to say, not every sentence is consisted of subject,predicate, object, attribute, adverbial and complement. In contrast, the incompletesentences, clauses, fragments of sentences, phrases and even the single word areused widely in people’s verbal communications. According to Yu Bin’s survey in2001, “In Beijing, people communicate with Beijing dialect in their daily lives, theelliptical sentences occupy 64.5%.While the complete sentences only occupy35.5%”. Thus it can be seen that the Economy Principle of Language widely existsin verbal communication. Accelerated peace of social life and desires for highefficiency prompt the use of Economy Principle of Language. That can makespeakers and listeners save effort and time.The Economy Principle exists in every developmental stage of language. Theeconomic characteristic is an important aspect of universality of language. The easytendency of language and parole are called economic characteristic. A. Martinet firstput forward the concept “Economy Principle” in linguistic field. He holds thatEconomy Principle of Language was made up of two parts: the least effort andcommunicative needs. The use of Economy Principle of Language is a kind ofspeakers’ choice from a series of possible words. Throughout previous researches,most of them stay at the static level of language such as news discourses, advertisingand network language and so on. Few researches explore Economy Principle ofLanguage from the perspective of dynamic verbal communication. Therefore, thisthesis will explore the phenomena and characteristics of Economy Principle ofLanguage from the perspective of dynamic verbal communication.The conversationsin the American sitcom Modern Family are chosen as the research objective, and acorpus of Modern Family will be built. And based on the corpus, the linguisticrealization of Economy Principle of Language will be studied in this thesis. Throughthe description and analysis of Economy Principle, the thesis can guide the secondlanguage learners how to learn English, and it is very beneficial to second languageteaching and learning.
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1.2 Objectives and Significance of the Research
The conversations in Modern Family will be chosen as the corpus. Based on the corpus of Modern Family, this thesis will analyze the economic features ofconversations in terms of turn-taking system, turn-taking strategies, preferredorganizations based on the Conversational Analysis Theory which was proposed bySacks. This thesis mainly explores following questions:1)Which turn-constructional units reflects the Economy Principle of Languagein terms of turn-constructional component in Modern Family?2)In the turn-taking system(turn-initiating, turn-responding, turn-holding andturn-claiming), how does the Economy Principle of Language distribute in ModernFamily?3)Which pragmatic strategies used in turn-initiating, turn-responding,turn-holding and turn-claiming follow the Economy Principle of Language inModern Family?Economy Principle as an auxiliary pragmatic principle is widely used in theverbal communication. However, when people use the Economy Principle in theirtalks, they should pay attention to its effects. People’s verbal communication alwaysoccurs in a limited period of time, utilizing the information relevance to deliver theirinformative and communicative purposes briefly and efficiently. However, thatdoesn’t mean that the easier is the better regardless of the conversations’ occasions.The verbal communication is supposed to depend on the specific context, which canachieve the ideal communicative effects. When the participants communicate witheach other, they should notice the briefness of the language. If the communicativepurpose is not achieved, then the ideal communicative effects will not follow.Therefore, this kind of economic language makes no sense. From here we can seethat the language which people use in their communication is the unificationbetween the briefness and the effect. The purposes of this thesis are to research therules and features of Economy Principle of Language in the conversations. Theauthor hopes these findings are beneficial to the second language teaching andlearning, especially in the field of spoken English.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Studies on Economy Principle of Language
The Economy Principle is regarded as a fundamental rule used for guidinghuman being’s behaviors and it is applied to many fields. Therefore, it is alsosuitable for the linguistic field. Although the thoughts on the Economy Principle hadbeen reflected in many linguists’ works, they did not propose the clear content of thisprinciple, and they only made it as a universal principle to guide human beings’speech act.In the 19th century, a question on whether the development of language tendedtowards the ease and economy or not became a hot discussion among the linguists. Arepresentative character, American linguist Whitney, insisted that language evolutionwas towards economic direction. And he also pointed that the major tendency oflanguage development was to make people articulate much easier so that they couldexpress themselves by saving time and effort. ( Jespersen, 1954:261)In 1867, Whitney published his book: Language and the Study of Language. Inhis book, he pointed that all the behaviors of articulation relied on the effort, whichconsumed the energy of lung, throat and the muscle of mouth. No mater when theyarticulatated or did other physical or mental work, they always had an instinctivecharacteristic of avoiding using more effort. That can be called economy. He also putforward a thought:“ the tendency to ease utterances”, and used it for explaining a factthat the tendency of easing utterance was related to the phonetic utterances. Heexplained in details that people were more likely to adjust the forms of the utterancestowards to economy when they communicated with each other, so that they couldsave more effort and time.He thought that the abbreviation was a typical example oflanguage’ s tendency to economy.
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2.2 Studies on American Sitcoms
Situation comedy is a kind of light comedy which virtualizes reality lives’humor. It usually focuses on the family life. Every episode lasts for 30 minutes, andit is pided into 3 parts: setting scene, complicated contradictions, solvingcontradictions in a comedy way. The plots are all similar, which are about dailyaffairs. Each character of the comedy has his own personality features, and they areall sympathetic. Nowadays, situation comedies are widely accepted by the viewersall over the world. In many speaking English countries such as Britain, Australia andCanada, the situation comedies are one of the most popular TV programmes.Meanwhile, in China, they are becoming very popular, and they receive Chineseviewers’ affection, especially the English learners.Hartley(2001:66-67) classified the situation comedies into family sitcoms andworkplace sitcoms. The family sitcoms are always related to the family trifles. Thestories usually happen between family members. However, the families in thesitcoms are not traditional nuclear families in order to get the comedy effects, but thesingle parent families or the step families. These families are always the sources ofthe contradictions and humors. Although the plots in the family sitcoms are intricate,these contradictions will be dissolved in the laughter.
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Chapter Three Theoretical Framework...... 26
3.1 Conversational Analysis Theory.......... 26
3.1.1 The Turn and Turn-taking System....27
3.1.2 Turn-constructional Component.......28
3.1.3 Turn-taking Strategies......... 30
3.1.4 The Adjacency Pair.......31
3.2 Cognitive Context Theory...... 32
3.2.1 Cognitive Context.........32
3.2.2 The Economy Principle of Language and The Cognitive Context........33
Chapter Four Research Methodology.........35
4.1 Data Collection..........35
4.2 Analysis Procedures.........35
4.3 Research Questions..........36
Chapter Five Results and Discussion.........37
5.1 The Economy Principle in Turn-taking System of Modern Family..........37
5.2 The Economy Principle in Turn-taking Strategies of Modern Family......46
Chapter Five Results and Discussion
5.1 The Economy Principle in Turn-taking System of ModernFamily
During the process of conversation, the participants in the conversation do notspeak at the same time. They usually speak turn by turn, and how do participantsmanage the business of turn-taking in everyday talk? (Gao xiaofang :205). Basing ananalysis on a large collection of conversations recorded over a five-year period,Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson(1974) found that a conversation consisted of at leasttwo turns. Participant A first speaks, then a stop. After that, participant B speaks. Thedistribution of the turns in conversations is followed by A-B-A-B-A-B. A turn is thesmallest unit in the conversation, which refers the participant’s words from thebeginning to the end. When a turn ends, the next speaker begins. Turn-taking systemis made up of two parts: turn-constructional component and turn-allocation system.In this part, the Economy Principle of Language will be analyzed from theperspective of turn-constructional component. Through this analysis, the distributionof Economy Principle which is used by the participants in the conversation will beclear. And the linguistic realization of Economy Principle in the conversations willbe also explained.
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Conclusion
Through analyzing the Economy Principle in Modern Family based on theframework of Conversational Analysis Theory and the Cognitive Context Theory,the author finds that the Economy Principle largely exists in the turn-constructionunits, which includes word, phrase, and clause totally take up 37.04%, which are theelliptical forms of the sentences or the sentence fragments. And the simple sentenceoccupies about 33.89%, and the sentence group is only around 30.43%. From thesestatistics, we can infer that people prefer to choose the short, simple sentences fortheir communication, to some degree, they follow the Economy Principle. From thedata, we can see that the simple sentences are the most frequency in the units ofturn-construction, and then the words, clauses, phrases.Major findings on the turn-taking system are that the use of Economy Principleof Language in turn-responding stage takes the largest proportion about 26.31%,then the turn-initiating around 20.12%, turn-claiming about 24.30% and the lastturn-holding stage around 10.20%.Major findings on the use of Economy Principle of Language in theturn-initiating strategies in Modern Family are that the highest frequency isstatement,then nomination, greeting and euphemism follow. The participants usuallyinitiate a turn with a statement, which is a very direct way. The main reason is thatthe relationship between the participants in the conversation is very close, so theycan omit some greeting and phatic words to begin a turn. They express theircommunicative purposes directly, which is also a performance of EconomyPrinciple.
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The reference (omitted)