Signaling the Intent to Signal

Before I get distracted by too much nit-picking, let me get to the summary paragraph: Thomas Scott-Phillips' book, Speaking Our Minds, contributes seriously to the study of language origins. First and foremost, it demands that pragmatics—the study of language in its social context—be included in the effort to understand language origins. What's more, it makes good on its case. Pragmatics has been underplayed and anybody who thinks about language origins should read and study the book. If the book were not so danged expensive, I would even urge you to buy a copy. (By the way, I've mentioned Scott-Phillips before—see Reality Blogging—and I remember him as a promising fellow at the Barcelona Evolang conference of 2008.)
The case for pragmatics rests on its special view of language as an ostensive-inferential communications system. Sorry, I'd like to use some other term, but that is the one used by the author and others, so we might as well hold our noses and roll with the bandwagon. You can understand it by imagining the archetypal scene in which Homo erectus A points toward a charging sabertooth tiger and a second erectus (B) looks on. What is going on here? First, A has something it wishes to communicate to B. Second, A shows its communicative desire by pointing. Then B has to realize that A is trying to signal something and not just holding out a finger for B's admiration. B then follows A's finger and sees the charging sabertooth. B now infers that A is signaling da...

Source: Babel's Dawn - January 4, 2015 Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs