Статья

Economics of language

Jacob MarschakA contribution to Orbis Scriptus: Dmitry Tschižewskij zum 70. Geburtstag (W. Weintraub et al. (Eds.), Eidos Verlag, Muenchen), revised for this journal with the permission of the volume's publisher. It is a part of a research project on Individual and Organized Decision Making, carried out at the Western Management Science Institute, University of California at Los Angeles, and supported in part by the Office of Naval Research (Contract No. 233–75) and the Ford Foundation. The author was greatly stimulated by discussions at the Conference on Speech, Language, and Communication sponsored in November, 1963 by the Brain Research Institute, U.C.L.A., and the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research. He owes much to the contributions of P. Garvin, H. Hoijer, S. M. Lamb, and F. A. Lounsbury

1965en

ABI

Аннотация

A communication system may or may not be optimal with respect to some scale of values (utilities) that can be achieved by its use, combined with the probabilities of each of the possible achievements. One particular value is that of survival; for example, the survival of a given set of traits of a language, possibly depending on the survival of a given social form, or its physical carrier, a society. The study of survival probabilities would help to explain why the known living or dead languages are what they are or were. Here an “explanatory” or “evolutionary” approach is constrasted with the “normative” approach which has its example in debates about dictionaries, where certain other values besides that of survival are considered.

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Идентификаторы

DOI: 10.1002/bs.3830100203

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