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Zipf and the Principle of Least Effort

We trace the Principle of Least Effort to Zipf and his law on the relation between the rank of a word and its frequency first. Then we move on to his arguments about the Principle as a compromise between the Force of Unification and the Force of Diversification. We also introduce similar views advanced by Martinet, making clear that the Principle of Least Effort is in no way contradictory to redundancy in language.In the latter part, we concentrate on the relation between the Principle of Least Effort and pragmatics theories. Grice (1978) proposes a modified Occam's Razor, which clearly shows the connection between his theory and that of Zipf's. Horn (1984) combines the Principle of Least Effort with Grice's conversational maxims, and argues for a two-principle model: the hearer-based Q-principle and the speaker-based R-principle. In a sense, relevance theory originated with Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995) is also concerned with the Principle of Least Effort, who talk about the achievement of greater effect at the cost of less effort. Nevertheless, we believe that Horn's Q- and R-principles are a better account of language use than the Principle of Relevance. To substantiate this view, we discuss in some detail the interpretation of “an X" in terms of Q- and R-principles at the end.