Expressivity in Early Philosophy and Philology

Abstract As far back as the first century, rhetoricians have recognized the trade-off between brevity and obscurity (Horace), “not saying less, but not saying more, than the occasion demands” (Quintilian). Linguistic reflexes of the trade-off between hearer-based goals of informativity (or distinctness) and speaker-based goals of economy (or simplification) have long been acknowledged (and periodically rediscovered) by rhetoricians, philologists, philosophers, and linguists. This dialectic between cost and informativity, while significant for characterizing efficiency in information exchange, yields an incomplete picture of the nature of communication. Overlaid on this tug-of-war is a social pressure, variously identified as the besoin d’expressivité (Frei 1929) or extravagance (Keller 1994, Haspelmath 2000), which turns a static equilibrium into a dynamic impetus for linguistic change as reflected in word order shifts, the euphemism treadmill, and expressive morphology.