Expression Unleashed: The evolutionary & cognitive foundations of human communication

Abstract

Human expression is diverse and multi-faceted, ranging from ordinary language use to painting, from exaggerated displays of affection to micro-movements that aid coordination. Here we present and defend the claim that this expressive diversity is united by an interrelated suite of cognitive capacities, the evolved function of which is the expression and recognition of informative intentions. We describe how evolutionary dynamics normally leash communication to narrow domains of statistical mutual benefit, and how they are unleashed in humans. The relevant cognitive capacities are cognitive adaptations to living in a partner choice social ecology; and they are, correspondingly, part of the ordinarily developing human cognitive phenotype, emerging early and reliably in ontogeny. In other words, we identify distinctive features of our species’ social ecology that can explain how and why humans evolved the cognitive capacities that, in turn, lead to massive diversity in means and modes of expression. We make relevant cross-species comparisons, describe how the relevant cognitive capacities can evolve in a gradual manner, and survey how unleashed expression facilitates not only the evolution of languages, but novel behaviour in other domains too, focusing on the examples of joint action, punishment, and the arts. We aim to help reorient cognitive pragmatics, as a phenomenon that is not a supplement to linguistic communication and on the periphery of language science, but rather the foundation of many of the most of the most distinctive features of human behaviour and societies.

The role of interactional and cognitive mechanisms in the evolution of (proto)language(s)

“…More schematic (proto)constructions also had the potential of widening and expanding their context of use in a similar manner as is found in grammaticalization (Himmelmann, 2004;Neels, 2020a); Context expansion is influenced by analogical mappings and associations of similar constructions and contexts, which is in line with approaches that assign processes of analogy a catalysing role in the evolution of protolanguage(s) (Brand et al, 2020). In addition, the schematisation of protolinguistic constructions would have been scaffolded by other processes that involved in the emergence of grammatical and (proto)linguistic structure, such as metaphor, metonymy, pragmatic inferences, and ostensiveinferential communication (Heintz and Scott-Phillips, 2021;Smith and Höfler, 2015).…”

“…In addition, successful communication during a given communicative episode was also scaffolded by ostensive-inferential communication, which aided the resolution of potential producer/recipient mismatches (Johansson & Fujita, this volume (Heintz and Scott-Phillips, 2021)) as well as repair mechanisms (Dingemanse et al, 2015) and the interactional mechanisms of alignment and "ad hoc constructionalization" described in this paper.…”

“…that the interactive mechanisms involved in the emergence of (proto)linguistic structure in interactional encounters involve both more low-level, automatic processes, as well as higher-level, mediated processes that involve hominin's advanced abilities in the domain of perspective-taking, social cognition, and ostensive-inferential cooperative communication (Pleyer & Lindner 2014;Pleyer, 2017;Heintz and Scott-Phillips, 2021;Scott-Phillips, 2015;Tomasello, 2019).…”

Underdeterminacy without ostension: A blind spot in the prevailing models of communication

“…Some argue that ostensive stimuli can be produced without the meta-representational intentions that Sperber and Wilson's definition requires (Green, 2007, Chapter 3;Moore, 2017). Some also point out that the inferential model can apply to cases where informative intentions are only weakly manifest (Heintz & Scott-Phillips, 2023, Section 8). 3 Among contemporary pragmatists, those who have most insisted on this point probably are relevance theorists, but see also, for instance, Roberts (2018).…”

“…Another account that should be mentioned here is Heintz and Scott-Phillips's (2023). They argue that "pragmatics should be characterised as the study of how, and the many means by which, informative intentions are satisfied" (p. 33).…”