abstract

Human communication is most clearly distinguished from that of other primate species by its use of (a) symbols, and (b) grammar. Both of these unique features are products of a unique form of human social cognition and its deployment in certain forms of social interaction. Linguistic symbols are actually constituted by two or more humans with the species-unique form of social cognition attempting to communicate with one another - i.e., by the human form of intersubjectivity. Grammar results from the historical process of grammaticalization in which speakers using loose discourse sequences of symbols create from them more tightly organized syntactic constructions - often creating in the process grammatical items that serve as the structuring elements of those constructions. Grammaticalization derives from certain features of human intersubjectivity, social interaction, and information processing at work in repetitive - and therefore to some degree predictable - communicative situations.

 Conference site: http://www.infres.enst.fr/confs/evolang/