ABSTRACT
It is within the neo-Gricean school of thought that in recent years the work of George Kingsley Zipf, especially what he called the Principle of Least Effort, was rediscovered and put to use in fresh approaches to the study of inferential principles like Grice’s Co-operative Principle (1975) or the Principle of Informativeness by Atlas and Levinson (1981). Zipf claims that there is ‘one single primary principle’ (1949: 1) which is operative in any human action, including verbal communication. This principle he describes thus:
In simple terms, the Principle of Least Effort means, for example, that a person in solving his immediate problems will view these against the background of his probable future problems, as estimated by himself. Moreover he will strive to solve his problems in such a way as to minimize the total work that he must expend in solving both his immediate problems and his probable future problems. That in turn means that the person will strive to minimize the probable average rate of his work-expenditure (over time). And in so doing he will be minimizing his effort…. Least effort, therefore, is a variant of least work.
(Zipf 1949: 1)