Tomasello Michael. Origins of Human Communication

Cambridge, Massachusetts - London, England: The MIT Press, 2008. — 405 pp.This volume is based on the Jean Nicod Lectures delivered in Paris in the Spring of 2006. Given the people at the Jean Nicod institute, I chose to focus on communication. I have done a fair amount of empirical and theoretical work on: (i) great ape gestural communication; (ii) human infants’ gestural communication; and (iii) human children’s early language development. I have also worked a good bit on more general cognitive and social-cognitive processes involved in human communication and language: (i) social and cultural cognition; (ii) social and cultural learning; and (iii) cooperation and shared intentionality. My attempt in this volume is to bring all of this together into one coherent account of the evolution and development of human communication. The single animating idea of this attempt is that there must be some fairly specific connections between the fundamentally cooperative structure of human communication, as initially discovered by Grice, and the especially cooperative structure of human, as opposed to other primate, social interaction and culture in general.