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Pragmatics, prosody, and evolution: Language is more than a symbolic system

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 August 2005

Boris Kotchoubey
Boris Kotchoubey*
Affiliation:
Institute of Medical Psychology and Behavioral Neurobiology, University of Tübingen, 72074Tübingen, Germanyhttp://www.uni-tuebingen.de/medizinischepsychologie/stuff/
*
[email protected]
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Abstract:

The model presented in the target article is biased towards a cognitive-symbolic understanding of language, thus ignoring its other important aspects. Possible relationships of this cognitive-symbolic subsystem to pragmatics and prosody of language are discussed in the first part of the commentary. In the second part, the issue of a purely social versus biological mechanisms for transition from protolanguage to properly language is considered.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , April 2005 , pp. 136 - 137
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2005

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References

Note

1. From the pragmatic point of view, a message always remains “here and now.” For instance, I am going to discuss the transition from protolanguage to language, which was about 100,000 years ago, that is, fairly “beyond the here-and-now”; but my aim is to convince Arbib or other readers today.