Origins of Human Communication

Origins of Human Communication PDF Author: Michael Tomasello
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262261200
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
A leading expert on evolution and communication presents an empirically based theory of the evolutionary origins of human communication that challenges the dominant Chomskian view. 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.

Origins of Human Communication

Origins of Human Communication PDF Author: Michael Tomasello
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262515202
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
A leading expert on evolution and communication presents an empirically based theory of the evolutionary origins of human communication that challenges the dominant Chomskian view. 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.

Origins of Human Communication

Origins of Human Communication PDF Author: Michael Tomasello
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262261200
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 409

Get Book

Book Description
A leading expert on evolution and communication presents an empirically based theory of the evolutionary origins of human communication that challenges the dominant Chomskian view. 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.

A Natural History of Human Morality

A Natural History of Human Morality PDF Author: Michael Tomasello
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674915879
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
Michael Tomasello offers the most detailed account to date of the evolution of human moral psychology. Based on experimental data comparing great apes and human children, he reconstructs two key evolutionary steps whereby early humans gradually became an ultra-cooperative and, eventually, a moral species capable of acting as a plural agent “we”.

The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition

The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition PDF Author: Michael TOMASELLO
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674660323
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Bridging the gap between evolutionary theory and cultural psychology, Michael Tomasello argues that the roots of the human capacity for symbol-based culture are based in a cluster of uniquely human cognitive capacities. These include capacities for understanding that others have intentions of their own, and for imitating, not just what someone else does, but what someone else has intended to do. Tomasello further describes with authority and ingenuity how these capacities work over evolutionary and historical time to create the kind of cultural artifacts and settings within which each new generation of children develops.

Speaking Our Minds

Speaking Our Minds PDF Author: Thom Scott-Phillips
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1137312734
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Language is an essential part of what makes us human. Where did it come from? How did it develop into the complex system we know today? And what can an evolutionary perspective tell us about the nature of language and communication? Drawing on a range of disciplines including cognitive science, linguistics, anthropology and evolutionary biology, Speaking Our Minds explains how language evolved and why we are the only species to communicate in this way. Written by a rising star in the field, this groundbreaking book is required reading for anyone interested in understanding the origins and evolution of human communication and language.

Origins of Human Language

Origins of Human Language PDF Author: Louis-Jean Boë
Publisher: Speech Production and Perception
ISBN: 9783631737262
Category : Animal communication
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book proposes a detailed picture of the continuities and ruptures between communication in primates and language in humans. It explores a diversity of perspectives on the origins of language, including a fine description of vocal communication in animals, mainly in monkeys and apes, but also in birds, the study of vocal tract anatomy and cortical control of the vocal productions in monkeys and apes, the description of combinatory structures and their social and communicative value, and the exploration of the cognitive environment in which language may have emerged from nonhuman primate vocal or gestural communication.

The Social Origins of Language

The Social Origins of Language PDF Author: Robert M. Seyfarth
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 140088814X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
How human language evolved from the need for social communication The origins of human language remain hotly debated. Despite growing appreciation of cognitive and neural continuity between humans and other animals, an evolutionary account of human language—in its modern form—remains as elusive as ever. The Social Origins of Language provides a novel perspective on this question and charts a new path toward its resolution. In the lead essay, Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney draw on their decades-long pioneering research on monkeys and baboons in the wild to show how primates use vocalizations to modulate social dynamics. They argue that key elements of human language emerged from the need to decipher and encode complex social interactions. In other words, social communication is the biological foundation upon which evolution built more complex language. Seyfarth and Cheney’s argument serves as a jumping-off point for responses by John McWhorter, Ljiljana Progovac, Jennifer E. Arnold, Benjamin Wilson, Christopher I. Petkov and Peter Godfrey-Smith, each of whom draw on their respective expertise in linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. Michael Platt provides an introduction, Seyfarth and Cheney a concluding essay. Ultimately, The Social Origins of Language offers thought-provoking viewpoints on how human language evolved.

The Origins and Growth of Communication

The Origins and Growth of Communication PDF Author: Lynne Vernon-Feagans
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
This volume examines the development of communication from infancy through the early school years from the perspectives of ethology, anthropology, social psychology, psychiatry, linguistics, and interactional analyses. The focus of the volume is based on a view that communication is of central importance to the development of the individual and to the structure of the interactions, relationships, groups and communities that comprise the environment of human growth.

Human Communication

Human Communication PDF Author: Maria D. Sera
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119684315
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Cutting edge scholarship on the origins and functions of human communication In Volume 40 of Human Communication: Origins, Mechanism, and Functions, a distinguished team of editors delivers the latest scholarship to researchers, students, and practitioners interested in and working in the field of human communication. This vital resource explores the phylogenetic and ontogenetic origins, as well as the functions, of human communication. It will earn a place in the libraries of developmental psychologists, researchers and professionals dealing with speech, as well as a wide range of other academics and practitioners in language-related fields.

Communicating

Communicating PDF Author: Ruth Finnegan
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000954633
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Treatments of human communication mostly draw on cognitive and word-centred models to present it as predominantly a matter of words. This, Finnegan argues, seriously underestimates the far-reaching multi-modal qualities of human interconnecting and the senses of touch, olfaction, and, above all, audition and vision that we draw on. In an authoritative and readable account, Ruth Finnegan brings together research from linguistic and sensory anthropology, material culture, non-verbal communication, computer-mediated communication, and, strikingly, research on animal communication, such as the remarkable gesture systems of great apes. She draws on her background in classical studies and her long anthropological experience to present illuminating examples from throughout the world, past and present. The result is to uncover an amazing array of sounds, sights, smells, gestures, looks, movements, touches, and material objects used by humans and other animals to interconnect both nearby and across space and time She goes on to first explore the extra-sensory modes of communication now being revealed in the extraordinary "new science" research and then, in an incendiary conclusion, to deny the long-prevailing story of human history by questioning whether orality really came before literacy; whether it was really through "the acquisition of language" that our prehistoric cave painting ancestors made a sudden leap into being "true humans"; and finally, astonishingly, to ask whether human communicating had its first roots not, after all, in verbal language but something else. Not to be missed, this highly original book brings a fresh perspective on, among other things, that central topic of interest today – the dawn of human history – and on what being homo sapiens really means. This revised and updated edition has additional illustrations, updated chapters, and a new concluding chapter. A provocative and controversial account that will stir worldwide debate, this book is an essential transdisciplinary overview for researchers and advanced students in language and communication, anthropology, and cultural studies.