This is a guest post by Thom Scott-Phillips, previewing his new book, ‘Speaking Our Minds: Why Human Communication Is Different, And How Language Evolved To Make It Special’, which has just been published by Palgrave MacMillan.
Research in language evolution does not pay much attention to pragmatics – the study of the communicative basis of language use. By way of illustration, the index to the Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution lists only 8 pages under ‘pragmatics’. In contrast, 213 pages are listed under ‘syntax’ and related terms. This is, I think, a major error.