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. Tomasello argues that human cooperative communication rests on a psychological infrastructure of shared intentionality (joint attention, common ground), evolved originally for collaboration and culture more generally. The basic motives of the infrastructure are helping and sharing: humans communicate to request help, inform others of things helpfully, and share attitudes as a way of bonding within the cultural group. These cooperative motives each created different functional pressures for conventionalizing grammatical constructions. Requesting help in the immediate you-and-me and here-and-now, for example, required very 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' cooperative communication emerged first in the natural gestures of pointing and pantomiming. Conventional communication, first gestural and then vocal, evolved only after humans already possessed these natural gestures and their shared intentionality infrastructure along with skills of cultural learning for creating and passing along jointly understood communicative conventions. Challenging the Chomskian view that linguistic knowledge is innate, Tomasello proposes instead that the most fundamental aspects of uniquely human communication are biological adaptations for cooperative social interaction in general and that the purely linguistic dimensions of human communication are cultural conventions and constructions created by and passed along within particular cultural groups.

邁剋爾·托馬塞洛(1950—，Michael Tomasello)

美國發展心理學傢，擔任德國萊比锡馬剋思普朗剋演化人類學研究所所長，兼任沃爾夫岡剋勒靈長類研究中心(Wolfgang Kohler Primate Research Cerlter)主任。心理學齣身的托馬塞洛，跨足語言學及生物演化等研究領域。主要從發展、比較、文化的角度來探究社會認知、社會學習、人類和類人猿的溝通／語言等議題。並著重研究兒童如何通過習得語言，成為文化團體的一分子。同時還緻力於研究與人類最接近的靈長動物黑猩猩，以探究人類語言群體演化發展的起源。