Friday, June 27 at 13:00 in Centro Carlos Santamaria Room 5. The talk will be hybrid. If you want to participate, please contact m.aste.tb2@gmail.com

Prominent theories of language evolution suggest that the flexibility and open-endedness of human communication relies on the ability to form and recognise communicative intentions. The origins of this idea can be traced to the work of Paul Grice, who proposed that the meaning of an utterance depends on an audience’s recognition of the intentions with which the utterance is produced by a speaker. However, a lively debate continues about the cognitive basis of communicative intentions, their presence in animal communication, and their explanatory role in theories of human language evolution more generally. In this talk, I review current debates on the role of communicative intentions in language evolution, focusing on ‘expressive communication’ (EC) proposals (e.g., Bar-On 2013). Engaging empirical research on cognitive development and gestural communication in great apes, I argue that EC-proposals should spell out in more detail how embodied norms underlie expressive, communicative interactions, and propose that the notion of sensorimotor norms, as developed within the enactive approach (Di Paolo et al. 2017), provides a promising theoretical framework for this task. Finally, I sketch some implications of this proposal for thinking about the embodied foundations of communicative intentions and their role in theories of language evolution, to be addressed in future work.

Bar‐On, D. (2013). Origins of Meaning: Must We ‘Go Gricean’? Mind & Language, 28(3), 342–375. https://doi.org/10.1111/mila.12021
Di Paolo, E. A., Buhrmann, T., & Barandiaran, X. E. (2017). Sensorimotor life: An enactive proposal. Oxford University Press.