Abstract
Alexander Barulin’s most notable results have to do with the communicative aspects of the human protolanguage. This kind of research differs from the conventional reconstructions of proto-languages because it cannot rely on material traces left by ancient humans, and the linguistic structures properly speaking are hardly available. Thus, linguists cannot put forward a description of phonetic and grammatical systems of the languages of the first humans. Instead, conjectures are usually made based on the etological-communicative studies of animal behaviour. Following Alexander Barulin, animal communication displays certain signs analogous to ‘hedges’, whose main function consists in accommodating information conveyed as a sort of ‘goods’ in communicative ‘exchange’. Hedges of “possibly” vs. “probably” types belong to linguistic techniques extensively used both in West-European and in Russian discourses. Lexical properties of such hedges interact with grammatical and pragmatical categories of tense, mood, and negation.
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