Evolutionary Pragmatics Communicative Interaction and the Origins of Language

Bart Geurts, Professor of the Philosophy of Language and Logic, Radboud University Nijmegen,Richard Moore, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick

Bart Geurts is Professor of the Philosophy of Language and Logic at Radboud University, Nijmegen. His main research interests are in semantic and pragmatic theory, but he has also carried out experimental research and has published on topics related to language development, language change, reasoning, social cognition, and evolution. His many publications include Presupposition and Pronouns (Elsevier, 1999) and Quantity Implicatures (CUP, 2010).


Richard Moore is Associate Professor of Philosophy and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the University of Warwick, having previously held positions at Humboldt University Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. His Communicative Mind research group conducts philosophical and empirical research on the relationship between communication and theory of mind in human and non-human great apes.

1. Intentions in human and non-human great ape communication, Richard Moore2. Signal-use and pragmatics in the first natural language users: Kinds of signs, Suzanne Aussems and Richard Moore3. Pragmatically intermediate protolanguage, Dorit Bar-On4. Gricean communication, natural language, and human evolution, Daniel W. Harris5. The evolutionary foundations of common ground, Josh Armstrong6. Pragmatics in ape gesture, Kirsty E. Graham and Catherine Hobaiter7. Cultural evolutionary pragmatics: An empirical approach to the relation between language and social cognition, Paula Rubio-Fernandez8. Conventions, coordination, and arbitrariness, Bob van Tiel and Bart Geurts9. Population-level models of evolutionary pragmatics, Roland Mühlenbernd and Andreas Baumann10. Normative pragmatics and social structures: An evolutionary perspective, Bart Geurts11. The co-evolution of pragmatics and grammatical complexity, Eva Wittenberg and Ray Jackendoff