Origins of Human Communication

by Tomasello, Michael

• ISBN13: 9780262515207
• ISBN10: 0262515202
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-08-13
• Publisher: Bradford Books

Summary

Winner, 2009 Eleanor Maccoby Book Award in Developmental Psychology, presented by the American Psychological Association. and Honorable Mention, Literature, Language & Linguistics category, 2008 PROSE Awards presented by the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers. Human communication is grounded in fundamentally cooperative, even shared, intentions. In this original and provocative account of the evolutionary origins of human communication, Michael Tomasello connects the fundamentally cooperative structure of human communication (initially discovered by Paul Grice) to the especially cooperative structure of human (as opposed to other primate) social interaction. Tomasello argues that human cooperative communication rests on a psychological infrastructure of shared intentionality (joint attention, common ground), evolved originally for collaboration and culture more generally. The basic motives of the infrastructure are helping and sharing: humans communicate to request help, inform others of things helpfully, and share attitudes as a way of bonding within the cultural group. These cooperative motives each created different functional pressures for conventionalizing grammatical constructions. Requesting help in the immediate you-and-me and here-and-now, for example, required very little grammar, but informing and sharing required increasingly complex grammatical devices. Drawing on empirical research into gestural and vocal communication by great apes and human infants (much of it conducted by his own research team), Tomasello argues further that humans' cooperative communication emerged first in the natural gestures of pointing and pantomiming. Conventional communication, first gestural and then vocal, evolved only after humans already possessed these natural gestures and their shared intentionality infrastructure along with skills of cultural learning for creating and passing along jointly understood communicative conventions. Challenging the Chomskian view that linguistic knowledge is innate, Tomasello proposes instead that the most fundamental aspects of uniquely human communication are biological adaptations for cooperative social interaction in general and that the purely linguistic dimensions of human communication are cultural conventions and constructions created by and passed along within particular cultural groups. Jean Nicod Lectures A Bradford Book

Author Biography

Michael Tomasello is Codirector of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig. He is the author of The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition and Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition.

Table of Contents

Series Foreword	p. ix
Preface and Acknowledgments	p. xi
A Focus on Infrastructure	p. 1
Primate Intentional Communication	p. 13
Vocal Displays	p. 15
Gestural Signals	p. 20
Communication with Humans	p. 34
Intentionality in Ape Communication	p. 43
Conclusion	p. 53
Human Cooperative Communication	p. 57
Pointing and Pantomiming	p. 60
The Cooperation Model	p. 72
Communicative Conventions	p. 99
Conclusion	p. 107
Ontogenetic Origins	p. 109
Infant Pointing	p. 111
Sources of Infant Pointing	p. 135
Early Pantomiming	p. 145
Shared Intentionality and Early Language	p. 154
Conclusion	p. 165
Phylogenetic Origins	p. 169
The Emergence of Collaboration	p. 172
The Emergence of Cooperative Communication	p. 191
The Emergence of Conventional Communication	p. 218
Conclusion	p. 237
The Grammatical Dimension	p. 243
The Grammar of Requesting	p. 246
The Grammar of Informing	p. 270
The Grammar of Sharing and Narrative	p. 282
The Conventionalization of Linguistic Constructions	p. 295
Conclusion	p. 316
From Ape Gestures to Human Language	p. 319
Summary of the Argument	p. 320
Hypotheses and Problems	p. 327
Language as Shared Intentionality	p. 342
References	p. 347
Author Index	p. 373
Subject Index	p. 379
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