Expression, Communication, and Origins of Meaning

How did human language evolve from animal communication? Drawing on insights from philosophy of language and mind, and findings from linguistics, ethology, biology, cognitive psychology, and more, Expression, Communication, and Origins of Meaning offers a novel solution to the 'first hard problem' of language evolution'. This is the problem of explaining the emergence of meaningful communication. Addressing this problem, Dorit Bar-On argues that there are significant pragmatic continuities between human natural languages and animal communication systems, side by side with significant syntactic and semantic differences. Building on these pragmatic continuities, Bar-On traces a path leading from animal communication to human linguistic communication via a pragmatically intermediate 'protolanguage'. One significant milestone on this path is the emergence of the capacity for expressive communication, which adult humans share with young children and with nonhuman animals. In expressive communication, minded creatures enable each other to recognize their psychological states through their expressive behaviors. A second milestone is the emergence of psychologically mediated communication, whereby expressive behaviors serve as 'psychological clues' that pragmatically enrich messages conveyed by animals' communicative signals. A third milestone is reached once communicators learn to make flexible use of psychological clues to communicate about the world intentionally. The road is then clear to the emergence of a pragmatically intermediate protolanguage - a fourth milestone. Protolanguage is a stable system of communication that enables communicators to convey messages about the world and about each other in pragmatically sophisticated ways. Although a pragmatically intermediate protolanguage lacks the distinctive semantic and structural features of human language, understanding its emergence and character should shed some light on the emergence of these further features. The book's concluding chapters offers a characterization of the hypothesized protolanguage and its evolutionary significance and identify potential present-day 'pragmatic fossils' of protolanguage - words and phrases whose uses are themselves pragmatically intermediate.

Dorit Bar-On studied Philosophy and Linguistics at Tel Aviv University while working as a translator of poetry, literature, and philosophy, and received her PhD in Philosophy from UCLA. She has published extensively on meaning and translation, Quine, Davidson, and Grice, conceptual relativism, truth and truth-conditions, first-person authority and self-knowledge, expressivism, animal communication, pragmatics, and the evolution of language. Bar-On currently teaches at the University of Connecticut, having moved there after years of teaching at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her main areas of research are philosophy of language and mind, epistemology, philosophy of animal mind, language evolution, and metaethics. She is the director of an interdisciplinary research group established in 2010. Bar-On has held several prestigious fellowships, including at the National Humanities Center, the Wissenschafts Kolleg zu Berlin, and Duke University. She was an NEH fellow in 2021.