Drawing as Expression

Human communication is grounded in fundamentally cooperative, even shared,intentions. In this original and provocative account of the evolutionary origins of humancommunication, Michael Tomasello connects the fundamentally cooperative structure of humancommunication (initially discovered by Paul Grice) to the especially cooperative structure of human(as opposed to other primate) social interaction. Tomasello argues that human cooperativecommunication rests on a psychological infrastructure of shared intentionality (joint attention,common ground), evolved originally for collaboration and culture more generally. The basic motivesof the infrastructure are helping and sharing: humans communicate to request help, inform others ofthings helpfully, and share attitudes as a way of bonding within the cultural group. Thesecooperative motives each created different functional pressures for conventionalizing grammaticalconstructions. Requesting help in the immediate you-and-me and here-and-now, for example, requiredvery 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' cooperativecommunication emerged first in the natural gestures of pointing and pantomiming. Conventionalcommunication, first gestural and then vocal, evolved only after humans already possessed thesenatural gestures and their shared intentionality infrastructure along with skills of culturallearning for creating and passing along jointly understood communicative conventions. Challengingthe Chomskian view that linguistic knowledge is innate, Tomasello proposes instead that the mostfundamental aspects of uniquely human communication are biological adaptations for cooperativesocial interaction in general and that the purely linguistic dimensions of human communication arecultural conventions and constructions created by and passed along within particular culturalgroups.