Chapter 3. Narrative and pantomime at the origin of language

Abstract

The present chapter proposes a pantomimic account of language origin resting on a persuasive/narrative conception of human communication. Relying on the twofold constraint of the cognitive architectures responsible for the processing of the mental content and of the material resources for expressing that content, I suggest that pantomime represented an ideal means to convey proto-narrative representations in the absence of verbal language. Although representing an early effective form of protolanguage because of its narrative persuasive power, pantomime shows its limits in sustaining a more sophisticated type of communication characterizing face-to-face conversation. In this context, the need to engage in an arguing-counterarguing dialectics might have created new selective pressures towards complex syntactic structures able to support argumentative forms of persuasion.