Four Pressures on Language

Psycholinguist Dan Slobin (1979) says that there are four pressures on language that keeps the language in a dynamic equilibrium.

Be Clear
It is important for a language to be clear so that there will be no misunderstandings and people won't be confused. People's mind is usually expecting one-to-one mapping. If a language form represents several different meanings, it will be hard to people to acquire the language.
For example, in Russian, the feminine noun takes the ending -a when it functions as the subject while the masculine noun functions as the object also end with -a. This become a one-to-many mapping which is very confusing that makes it hard for people to acquire the language.

Be Processible
To be processible means both speaker and listener can produce and understand. It is important for a language to be match with how the human brain works. For example, sentences with relative clauses is easier for people to understand when relative pronoun is included. That is,

The student who the teacher hit cried.
is understood faster and easier than
The student the teacher hit cried.

Be Quick and Easy
Quick and easy is also the pressure of language because people might be in a hurry or the speaker doesn't want to talk with too much effort. For example, we all know "I got to go." is an expression of leaving. When the speaker is in a hurry or doesn't want to talk too strenuously, it might sound like "I gotta go." This kind of contraction is pretty common in our daily life. However, the grammatical marker is not clear in the sentence which might bring difficulties for people to understand and later on leads people to replace the expression with new ones. This kind of changing process is keeping the language in a dynamic equilibrium.

Be expressive
As language is for communication, it must be able to express things. In order to fulfill the requirement, to be semantically expressive and to be rhetorically expressive are important. To be semantically expressive means to express things meaningfully. To be rhetorically expressive means to express things "well and powerfully." For example, "YuSuKe broke the glass yesterday." and the sentence can change into many different forms depends on what the speaker want to emphasize. That is,

YuSuKe broke the glass yesterday.
Yesterday YuSuKe broke the glass.
It is YuSuKe that broke the glass yesterday.
It is the glass that was broken by YuSuKe yesterday.
It is yesterday that YuSuKe broke the glass.

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Work Cited

Nash, Thomas. Discovering Language: An Introduction to Linguistics for Students in Taiwan. 2nd edition. pre-publication version. 2008.

本文整理自Thomas Nash的Discovering Language: An Introduction to Linguistics for Students in Taiwan，未經該書作者同意不得轉載。