The cooperative character of language is an empirical fact and one of the key tenets in linguistics. However, this cooperative character is what makes it evolutionarily suspect: under normal circumstances sharing honest ...

Pantomime is a means of bodily visual communication that is based on iconic gestures that are not fully conventional. It has become a key element in many models of language evolution and a strong candidate for the original ...

Unlike many facets of language – phonology, syntax, semantics or even prag- matics – linguistic politeness (LP) has attracted little attention of evolutionarily minded researchers. We think that this lack of ...

In this paper, we complement proximate or ‘how’ explanations for the origins of language, broadening our perspective to include fitness-consequences explanations, i.e. ultimate, or ‘why’ explanations. We identify the ...

A persistent controversy in language evolution research has been whether language emerged in the gestural-visual or in the vocal-auditory modality. A “dialectic” solution to this age-old debate has now been gaining ground: ...

Could pantomime have been the key step in the evolutionary emergence of symbolic communication? Such a possibility has been consistently present in the intellectual reflection on language origins. What makes pantomime ...

Why is language unique? How and why did it emerge? Such questions are emblematic of the Western intellectual tradition, and while some even today see them as intractable, a majority consider the problem of language origins ...

This paper discusses the role of interactional and cognitive mechanisms in the emergence of (proto)linguistic structures and the evolution of (proto)language(s). Both the social, interactive nature of human communication ...

Metaphoric meaning extension is a central process in language evolution and historical language change. Here, we propose a computational method to further investigate the processes of metaphoric extension central to language ...