It suggests that the organization of phonology, morphology, lexicon and syntax is fundamentally based on a compromise between simplicity and clarity, two desirable but to some extent incompatible qualities.
The notion of good household management is transferred metaphorically from a social to a linguistic level where it represents a force maintaining systemic equilibrium.
The standard concept of economy, or, the "classical definition", was published by André Martinet in his Économie des changements phonétiques (1955).
Martinet studied the manifestations of economy in phonology and syntax and defined it as the unstable balance between the needs of communication—which are always changing—and natural human inertia, two essential forces contributing to the optimization of the linguistic system.
Georg von der Gabelentz (1901) did not use the term but identified two conflicting desiderata in grammar: comfort of the speaker, and clarity, which favors the addressee.
A review of studies carried out in diachronic and sociolinguistics found that, while language change is frequently the matter of the deletion of word endings, for example—which often contain grammatical elements—a disambiguation across the linguistic levels is also taking place.
However, Labov points out that meaning-preservation does not necessarily employ push-chains and pull-chains (as it did in the great vowel shift, for instance) and that functional decay is commonplace in language change.
[8] In theoretical linguistics, Labov is critical of the idea that functional change is based on the speech community's desire to improve their language.