Origins Of Human Communication Michael Tomasello by Michael Tomasello 978026251520 instant download after payment.

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.