Principle of Economy in Linguistic Communication

Abstract

The subject of the paper is the ways of interpreting messages that are defective either syntactically or semantically. The formal models of communicative events in which such messages are being sent are based on a specially designed situational ontology. A situation is something of the sort of pragram, and it is meant to represent both the context of use and the meaning of an utterance. Five „economy rules” explain why (and how) language is such a user-friendly device, highly tollerant to misuse: slips of the tongue, grammatical incorrectness, mistakes in meaning, etc.