Manifestation Levels of the Principle of Linguistic Economy in Word Combinations of Multi-System Languages

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the principle of linguistic economy in word combinations, or more precisely, in noun phrases in English and Azerbaijani languages, which belong to different types of language systems. This research is caused by the increasing interest in the question of how linguistic structures can be considered as optimally organized information units in human speech and in information technology. Even though linguistic economy has already been thoroughly described in theoretical linguistics, there is little empirical evidence regarding the realization of linguistic economy in word combinations of different languages in terms of information processing. The study makes use of comparative and functional-typological approaches and examines 500 noun phrase constructions (250 English and 250 Azerbaijani) taken from literary and journalistic texts of 2020-2025. The results indicate that English primarily employs the concept of linguistic economy through structural conciseness by means of pre-modification, linear stacking of modifiers, and word order fixity. On the other hand, Azerbaijani attains linguistic economy through morphological integration, such as affixation and case marking, where grammar and relations are encoded in the form of words. Despite the difference in structural strategies, both languages come to meet at a certain point in their communicative goal by way of making compact and efficient information units. This study also shows that linguistic economy is not just a simplification of the linguistic materials but a multi-level optimizing approach which works on the syntactic, morphological, and cognitive planes. The findings make the concept of linguistic economy pertinent to the field of information systems, where it can be applied in such issues as metadata construction, multilingual information retrieval, and natural language processing, where noun phrases constitute the main indexing unit.