Origins of human communication

Winner, 2009 Eleanor Maccoby Book Award in Developmental Psychology, presented by the American Psychological Association. and Honorable Mention, Literature, Language & Linguistics category, 2008 PROSE Awards presented by the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers. Human communication is grounded in fundamentally cooperative, even shared, intentions. In this original and provocative account of the evolutionary origins of human communication, Michael Tomasello connects the fundamentally cooperative structure of human communication (initially discovered by Paul Grice) to the especially cooperative structure of human (as opposed to other primate) social interaction.…