Form and Function of German Adjective Endings

A Concise Bibliography of Language Economics

“…First, a number of linguists (who may be said to represent structural linguistics, as opposed to sociolinguistics) describe the structure of language as a system, thereby arguing economically, but often without realizing it. For example, an economically inspired analysis of language structure goes back at least to Martinet (1955); essentially economic analyses of language change and structure can also be found in Chen (1972) or Esau (1973). They were apparently unaware of the economic relevance of their analysis, and neither these authors nor their many successors are included in this bibliography, although economists could learn a lot from them.…”