The article reflects on different aspects of politeness theory viewed from the ethological and evolutionary perspective. The author offers an explanation of politeness phenomena along proxemic lines – accordingly, politeness ...

The cooperative dimension of human linguistic communication has been gaining increasing recognition as a central problem in the evolution of language. Our paper documents the phenomenon of cooperative norms in conversation, ...

Why is language unique? How did language come about? When did this happen? Those questions, although quite emblematic of the Western intellectual tradition since its ancient beginnings, so far have not found satisfying ...

The heterogeneous category of phenomena covered by the term body language (roughly equivalent to nonverbal communication, NVC), although essential to human day-to-day communication, is also largely dissociable from human ...

The age-old debate between the proponents of the gesture-first and speech-first positions has returned to occupy a central place in current language evolution theorizing. The gestural scenarios, suffering from the problem ...