The relevance of body language to evolution of language research

Abstract

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 verbal behaviour. As such, it has received little attention in the area of evolution of language research. In this paper we point to an important factor – signal reliability (honesty) as an elementary constraint on communication as an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) – which shows promise of restoring the relevance of broadly construed body language to the evolution of language.