Language in the Marketplace
The government regulates unowned, descriptive language in commercial settings for a
variety of reasons. Here we concentrate on issues of market failure in efficiently allocating
language resources to firms because this will illuminate the issue of regulating the unowned
language of “marriage.” The analysis combines psycholinguistic research on language use with
economic models of competition for resources with ill-defined property rights (the commons
problem).
We start with the idea, as noted above, that meaning in both social and commercial
communication, that is, the mapping of objects to language and back, is not fixed. Both the set of
objects referred to and the use of language in relation to those objects can and does change. In some
cases this language change is uncontroversial. Because people tend to use the shortest, most easily
available utterance to express their meaning (Grice 1975) it is often the case that when a shift in the
characteristics of the object itself occurs, the meaning of the utterance used to describe the goods
shifts as well. For example, the evolution of the meaning of “regular” gasoline from leaded to
unleaded followed the shift in gas itself and means that we do not have to say “regular unleaded”
when we buy gas.
In this example, leaded gasoline left the market for reasons unrelated to language and
almost all retail gasoline is now unleaded, so the shift in the meaning of “regular” was relatively
uncontroversial – the shift was not an attempt to change consumer preference or privilege one
product over another. But there are examples where a shift in use is an attempt to stretch the
meaning of a word to fit the interest of only one party as an attempt to obscure potentially
important and contentious differentiating characteristics or simply to change consumer preferences
9
Convention