Rank and Relationships in the Evolution of Spoken Language

RANK AND RELATIONSHIPS IN THE EVOLUTION OF SPOKEN LANGUAGE

J L. L University of Cambridge

If evolutionary benefits associated with language were predominantly referential, as many theorists assume, then there must have been a preparatory stage in which an ‘appetite’ for information, not evident in the other primates, developed. To date, no such stage has been demonstrated. The problem dissipates, however, if it is assumed that language emerged from a function more nearly shared with other primates. An obvious candidate is displaying. Here I argue that performative functions associated with oral sound-making provided initial pressures for vocal communication by promoting rank and relationships. These benefits, I suggest, facilitated conflict avoidance and resolution, collaboration, and reciprocal sharing of needed resources. By valuing the performative applications of language, which continue in modern humans, one can more easily derive speech from the social-vocal behaviours of non-human primates, providing greater continuity in accounts of linguistic evolution.

One can think of few issues within the field of biological anthropology that are more important than the evolution of language. In the nineteenth century, this was the topic of boundless speculation, mainly by linguists. When it was discovered that most proposals could not be adequately judged, papers on linguistic evolution began to decline; in some forums, such as the Linguistic Society of Paris, they were even banned. In the last two decades there has been a resurgence of interest in linguistic evolution and, with that resurgence, the commencement of a new, more empiri- cally constrained type of scholarship (e.g. Bickerton 1995; Deacon 1997; Dunbar 1996; Hurford, Studdert-Kennedy & Knight 1998; Lieberman 1984; 1991; Pinker & Bloom 1990). As a result, there are now several reason- able proposals as to what might have occurred during key stages in the larger process. There has been a pervasive problem, however, stemming from limitations on what could be assumed about the social and cognitive capabilities of hominids. Lacking direct evidence, theorists necessarily took the contempo- raneous behaviours of non-human primates as the theoretical starting-point. However, and this is where the problem begins, monkeys and apes do not appear to be freely informative, relative to humans, even in ways allowed by the non-verbal strategies that are evidently at their disposal. Since transfer of information was considered the most important benefit of language, some theorists felt compelled to explain how it was that hominids began to traffic

© Royal Anthropological Institute 2001. J. Roy. anthrop. Inst. (N.S.) 7, 37-50 38 JOHN L. LOCKE in the kinds of material that can be exchanged linguistically. Although there are clear informational benefits of language, at least in modern societies, deriving those benefits from ape-like capabilities frames the problem, as de Laguna warned it would over seventy years ago, ‘in essentially insoluble form’ (1927: 10). In principle, the informational chasm could still be breached, but not without either a single large advance or several smaller ones. Since gradualism, an accepted tenet of Darwinian theory, directly opposes the idea of large evolutionary steps, there has been some interest in ‘proto-language’, a vocal-verbal system characterized by a restricted lexicon with word- order rules but no morphology or syntax (Bickerton 1995).1 Such a ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane’ type of system is achievable by individuals having less than a fully developed or informed capacity for grammatical language, including trained apes, children under the age of two, adults who were deprived of language in their early years, and speakers of pidgin. The benefits of proto-language, according to Bickerton, were thought and the communication of knowledge. This proposal reduces the size of a possible precursive step but, as an information-based system that in Bickerton’s own characterization lacked the potential for expansion, proto-language could not have been an intermediate stage, or at least the only such stage.This is because a system with those properties ignores the true theoretical need, a system of fluent, elaborate, and attention-getting vocal behaviours in individuals who, in their pre-linguistic state, were arguably more inclined to display than convey. Renfrew (1998) has suggested that if they are to be fully responsive to all relevant evidence, evolutionary theorists may need to distinguish between two major functions of language, one communal, the other informational. It is proposed here, in sympathy with Dunbar (1996), that the initial benefit of language was management of social relations, a benefit that rests on a series of specific behavioural functions for which non-human primates are well equipped neurologically (cf. Brothers 1997). Primates also engage in visual and vocal displays with some frequency, and are thus accustomed to elaborate, attention-getting sequences of behaviour that regulate social activity (Smith 1977). The mere existence of a display is minimally informative, of course, in so far as it conveys an intra-species message of, say, warning or greeting. But additional information on personal emotion and motivation may be discerned from the morphology of individual displays, adding relevance to the precise form of communicative behaviours.When the capacity for spoken language evolved, it did so ‘in a primate that already had displays and formalized patterns of interaction’, wrote W.J. Smith (1979: 73), ‘and these were not discarded’. And so it is that ‘non-verbal’ behaviours also significantly contribute to message transmission and interpretation in modern humans. Drawing on convergent findings from anthropology, ethology, social psychology, linguistics, and neuroendocrinology, I will attempt to demonstrate the plausibility of a performative hypothesis according to which language got its start in vocal behaviours that facilitated achievement of rank and relationships, regulatory functions of language that continue today. JOHN L. LOCKE 39

Vocal communication in primates

Although non-human primates live in highly organized groups whose cohesion requires continuous display and observation, monkeys and apes rarely seem to ‘donate’ information. Even in the context of infant-rearing, where there is some evidence for ‘teaching’ (Caro & Hauser 1992), there is nothing approaching the extensive modelling and didactic practices of humans (King 1994). Various primate groups signal to each other vocally, alarm and other calls demonstrate that, but there is little evidence in more relaxed settings that primates use their voices in order to inform. Some groups, such as chimpanzees, are inclined to interact silently (Tomasello, George, Kruger, Farrar & Evans 1985; Tomasello, Gust & Frost 1989), and among the more voluble species, for example, gelada monkeys, the goal is less obviously communicative than ‘communal’ (Richman 1980; 1987). The benefits of communal vocalization are obvious, for if animals are continuously aware of each other’s presence and whereabouts, ‘the channel of communication is always open for them, open for any type of sudden message through a variety of sensory modes’ (Richman 1980: 238). This is not to say that vocalization is reduced when geladas are in close proximity.Indeed, in several different primate groups there are various subdued forms of vocalization – girneys, lip- or tongue-smacking sounds, and ‘close calls’ – that are issued in the context and service of social relationships, often in association with grooming and appeasement (Harcourt, Stewart & Hauser 1993; Redican 1975). When primates do vocalize, information becomes available on several personal attributes that are valued by group-living individuals. In monkeys, for example, there is enough indexical information for the voice to be used in kin recognition (Cheney & Seyfarth 1980; Waser 1977), as well as in the expression of emotion (cf. Cheney & Seyfarth 1990). In our own species, the voice additionally carries information about age, sex, physical status, charac- ter, and personality (cf. Locke 1998b). Our hominid ancestors would have had this channel available to them, and undoubtedly used it to accomplish their own personal and social ends. I have speculated elsewhere that doing so biased them towards communicative systems that were vocal, hence, with the evolution of appropriate control mechanisms, articulate and ultimately phonological (Locke & Hauser 1999). Developmental psycholinguists (e.g. Dore 1974; Halliday 1975; Ninio & Snow 1996) have observed that pre-linguistic human infants systematically vary vocal intonation in a way that reveals illocutionary intent.These prosodic manipulations enable infants to label, request, answer, repeat, greet, reject, and comment before words are known or used. Ethologists have reported analogous vocal displays in non-human primates. Ten distinct coo calls were documented in one group of Japanese macaques, variations that corresponded to circumstances in which the monkeys found themselves (Green 1975), and in geladas several prosodic patterns seem to trip off differential vocal responses (Richman 1980). With certain modifications, syllables and sounds could have been inserted in these prosodic patterns (Locke 2000; MacNeilage & Davis 2000), enabling 40 JOHN L. LOCKE hominids not merely to be argumentative, but to argue; not merely to act in a questioning manner, but to ask. My claim is that those who spoke in unusu- ally fluent, rhythmic, novel, and elaborate ways were eligible for higher rank and more efficient relationships.

Rank Monkeys and apes live in hierarchically structured groups of dominant and submissive individuals and well-developed coalitions. So do humans. ‘We come into the world’, wrote the economist Frank (1985: 8), ‘equipped with a nervous system that worries about rank’. Indeed, when small groups of strangers are experimentally assembled, a dominance hierarchy usually becomes evident within the first minute (Fisek & Ofshe 1970; Kalma 1991). In human and non-human primates alike, the voice facilitates attainment of rank. Dessalles (1998: 142) has suggested that language is ‘an advertising device’ that aids collaboration and mating, and that individuals who are aware of this benefit ‘will compete with each other in eloquence to draw attention to themselves and to obtain status from the audience’. That verbal eloquence constitutes such an asset emerges from studies of the ‘big men’ of aboriginal societies. The big men of Papua New Guinea are recognized leaders with ‘more wives, more gardens, and more pigs than ordinary people’ (Lemonnier 1996: 221) thanks, in part, to ‘the rhetorical arts of persuasion and of focus- ing attention on themselves in debates’ (Strathern 1971: 76). Among the Kuma, according to Reay (1959), the leaders of sub-clans are ‘authorised orators’, also known as ‘Rhetoric Thumpers’. The public speeches of the Maoris of New Zealand are given ‘to keep an orator in the game without venturing his reputation’ rather than inform (Salmond 1975: 54). Asked to describe his political career, a Tshidi politician from the border of South Africa and Botswana ‘would usually do little more than recall a series of public speeches’ (Comaroff 1975: 143). Oratorical skill also benefits members of urban societies. Young Afro- Americans freely exercise rhetoric-thumping dispositions; their repertoire of verbal styles includes rapping, shucking and jiving, copping a plea, gripping, and sounding (Kochman 1969; 1981; see also Abrahams 1989). Each of these registers has its own distinct form and function. When verbal performing is perfected, it is considered ‘good talking’, a way of speaking characterized by ‘ornamental diction and elaborated grammar and syntax’ (Abrahams 1970: 506). If contemporary scholars are amused by the idea of speech without a great deal of semantic content, the reason should be obvious.They have been con- ditioned by years of literacy training. Unlike members of oral cultures, they were taught to speak as they do; provided extensive training in grammar and self-expression; advised to make sense when they speak. But the individuals whose attraction to vocal-verbal communication must be explained by evolutionary theory, like the hunter-gatherers of the early 1900s, had no such training. For them, one presumes that speech, in many of its applications, including rituals, was a special power whose emotional force surpassed that of the more information-oriented discourse that now thrives in industrial and JOHN L. LOCKE 41 information-oriented societies (cf. Malinowski 1935;Tambiah 1983). Language communicates ideas and thoughts, wrote de Laguna (1927: 10), ‘but to assume that this is its original and fundamental function is hopelessly to intellectual- ize it’. How, then, did simple forms of vocalization and speech elevate rank? We begin with Chance’s (1967) proposal that socially dominant primates are usually the focus of subordinates’ attention. Chance and Jolly suggested that it was the attention-holding effect of an animal, not merely its aggressiveness, that placed it near the centre of the group. ‘Periods of continuous or oscilla- tory attention’, they (1970: 175) wrote, ‘link the individual’s internal state of preparedness for social action to the members of the group or sub-group to which it belongs [and] thereby links it to its place in the society’. It is now well documented that dominant humans receive far more gazes from others, especially during the act of speaking, than subordinate individuals (Abramovitch 1976; Bales, Strodtbeck, Mills & Roseborough 1951; Exline, Ellyson & Long 1975). Since attention benefits rank, it is unsurprising that story-telling, a practice that places one at the centre of attention, figures prominently in cultures as diverse as the Limba of northern Sierra Leone and the fishermen of coastal Newfoundland (Faris 1966; Finnegan 1967). To be an attractive story-teller, however, one needs more than a good tale; one needs style.Among the Limba, each story is ‘a unique artistic creation in that the narrator himself enacts the tale, depicts the action with more, or less, characterization, mimicry, exaggera- tion, and effect through the use of tones, length, speed, singing, or ono- matopoeia in order to make his narrative vivid, attractive, and amusing to his audience’ (Finnegan 1967: 93). There is also a relationship between frequency of vocalization (or speech) and rank. In vervet monkey infants, who inherit their mother’s rank, significantly more calls per minute are produced by high-ranking animals than mid- and low-ranking ones (Locke & Hauser 1999). In studies of status in humans, the number of utterances produced in group interactions has become an accepted measure of dominance because of its surface validity, as well as its reliability and agreement with other measures (Fisek & Ofshe 1970; Kalma 1991). With one association between attention and rank, and another association between vocalization and rank, one naturally suspects a further connec- tion between vocalization and attention. Moynihan (1958: 525-6) suggested as much when he wrote: ‘Many highly gregarious species are notoriously noisy, uttering loud notes … almost continuously’, a habit that ‘probably increases their general conspicuousness’. Indeed, there is evidence that vocalization attracts attention and thereby increases rank. Working from video- tapes of young schoolchildren, Hold-Cavell and Borsutzky (1986) located over 500 cases in which a child was the centre of attention, that is, was looked at by three or more children simultaneously. Frequently verbalization preceded the looks, and it was found that children who attracted attention to themselves by verbalizing early in the school year – typically by calling to a classmate, inviting someone to look at something, or telling something in a loud voice – were far more likely than others to hold a high rank at the end of the year. 42 JOHN L. LOCKE

In other controlled studies of verbal ability and status it has been found that individuals who speak in long, multi-word sentences or hold the floor for long periods of time tend to be perceived by their conversational partners as more powerful than those who produce shorter utterances (Dabbs & Ruback 1984; Kendon & Cook 1969; Mulac 1989). Bales and his colleagues reported that in eighteen groups of six men the person who spoke the most was also addressed more often than others.The most voluble person also made more remarks to the whole group than to the sum of all the individuals, and distributed his remarks the most democratically. Men of lower rank, based on number of utterances, addressed more remarks to specific individuals, and markedly more to the dominant speaker, than to the group as a whole. This suggested to Bales and his colleagues that the top man in utterances acted ‘as a kind of communications center … performing a leadership function’ (Bales, Strodtbeck, Mills & Roseborough 1951: 465). He was, within the context of experimental communications groups, a ‘big man’. The big men discussed earlier are precisely that, men. Across diverse cultures, verbal performances have a male bias, just as aggression displays do. But there are other registers of speech, and these are associated with a different sex bias. Among females, power resides less in public demonstrations of verbal finesse than in the ability to carry off private applications of speech in per- sonally oriented talk (Aries & Johnson 1983; Bischoping 1993; Haas 1979; Johnson & Aries 1983; Levin & Arluke 1985). Intimate talking, a category that includes gossip and self-disclosure, tends to foster relationships. Investigators typically find that females are more inclined to speak intimately than males when interacting with a same-sex conversational partner of their own choosing, and in this context they also tend to be more talkative (Dabbs & Ruback 1984; Ickes & Barnes 1977), even as juveniles ( Jormakka 1976; Larson, Richards, Moneta, Holmbeck & Duckett 1996; Raffaelli & Duckett 1989; Smith & Connolly 1972). If, as it appears, rank can be elevated by elaborate, rhythmic, and fluent uses of the voice, this by itself would have increased the benefits of vocal learning, control, and, importantly, improvisation. But vocalization also plays an important role in the development and maintenance of social relationships and the competitive advantages that they provide.

Relationships Relationships are critical to group-living animals, including the diurnal primates. How do they develop and maintain their relationships; what do related animals do that unrelated animals do not? Fortunately, there is a great deal of relevant evidence, and it reveals a significant role for manual grooming, a social behaviour that is usually performed on dominant animals by subordinate ones (Cheney 1977; Cheney & Seyfarth 1990). Manual grooming works well on a local basis, its strength as a bonding agent stemming from a limitation: grooming with the hands is inherently one- on-one. But primates also need to build nests, feed, have sex, and take care of their infants. Dunbar (1996) has calculated that no group could have spent more than about 20 per cent of its time grooming without encroaching on JOHN L. LOCKE 43 these other functions. He also presented evidence that total grooming time goes up with group size, probably because the need for alliances rises in pro- portion to the number of perceived competitors and aggressors. As groups enlarged, a more efficient way of servicing relationships became necessary, a problem that hominids solved by grooming with the voice. One might wonder what vocal grooming has to do with speech, at least if the purpose of that medium is transmission of thought. But speech has other uses. After a period of fieldwork on the Trobriand Islands, Malinowski (1923: 316) wrote that speech ‘serves to establish bonds of personal union between people brought together by the mere need of companionship … It is only in certain very special uses among a civilised community and only in its highest uses that language is employed to frame and express thoughts’. This behaviour, which Malinowski called ‘phatic communion’, has been attested in numerous analyses of ordinary speech in other cultures (cf. Schneider 1988). One example was supplied by an American couple who sub- mitted to audio recording while on holiday. An analysis of nearly two thou- sand separate messages spoken by the couple revealed that fully three-fourths of their utterances were comments that involved no transmission of facts or other concrete information (Soskin & John 1963). Human infants vocally commune, too (cf. Locke 1996; in press). They usually engage in vocal turn-taking with their mother long before they speak, and vocalize to maintain proximity with her (Bowlby 1969). The complexity of their vocalization influences the subjective impressions of listeners (Bloom & Lo 1990; Bloom, D’Odorico & Beaumont 1993), and may affect care-giving practices, something it seems to do in pygmy marmosets (Elowson, Snowdon & Lazaro-Perea 1998a; 1998b; Snowdon, Elowson & Roush 1997). The vocal-verbal behaviours that facilitate relationships indirectly confer additional benefits. One relates to the use of speech to avoid and resolve interpersonal conflict.

C    In the Solomon Islands, the people of Santa Isabel regularly use a verbal register called gruarutha to ‘talk out’ bad thoughts and feelings and thereby ‘dis- entangle’ conflicts. According to White (1990), disentangling takes two forms: a therapeutic activity aimed at the psychosocial causes of the conflict and a preventive measure used to reduce bad feelings that could interfere with co- operative activities (e.g. turtle-hunting). Traditionally, persons of Polynesian ancestry in Hawaii have engaged in a speech practice called ho’opopono, the purpose of which is to ‘set things right’ following a conflict (Boggs & Chun 1990). In other communities, of course, there are additional ways of prevent- ing and resolving conflict. Several of the Afro-Caribbean speech registers mentioned previously are harmless ways of expressing aggression, not dissimilar to non-verbal rituals carried out by groups of young men in other cultures (Marsh 1978). In ‘sounding’, a close relative of one of the group members is insulted. Members of the ‘audience’ make sounds of disapproval, encouraging the wounded party to launch a similar slur on the protagonist’s family. If the victim successfully 44 JOHN L. LOCKE defends his honour, the attacker is forced to come up with additional insults. This continues until onlookers become bored or distracted, or the victim loses his temper and physically attacks the tormentor. If this occurs, the person who ‘started it’ is considered victorious because his words were artfully provoca- tive. His opponent loses face both because he was unable to respond with the same quality of verbal behaviour and because he failed to restrict his attacks to the verbal level. Sounding thus enables young men to increase their social standing without recourse to physical violence.

C A second beneﬁt of relationships, and therefore the facilitative verbal behaviours, relates to collaboration. Although apes and monkeys are able to hunt and co-operate in other ways without language (cf. Boesch 1994; Harcourt & Waal 1992), even a small amount of verbal behaviour can extend the ability of individuals to work together in the accomplishment of complex tasks. Evi- dence of this is ubiquitous in modern societies, so our attention here will be limited to one example, the Trobriand Islanders’ use of speech to co-ordinate efforts to capture ﬁsh. Malinowski (1935: 58) wrote:

A small ﬂeet of canoes moving in concerted action is constantly directed and its movements co-ordinated by verbal utterance. As a result of that verbal symbol the canoes rearrange themselves so that the nets can be cast properly and the shoal of ﬁsh driven into them, and constant verbal instructions pass from one canoe to another in the process.

Presumably nothing more than a skeletal vocabulary would be needed for such activity – a few words for the different directions, the nets, the individual canoes – and yet one can imagine the difﬁculty of co-ordinating these elements with hand gestures and cries alone.

R A third beneﬁt of many relationships relates to the reciprocal sharing of goods and services. In chimpanzees, according to recent work by Frans de Waal (1997), food-sharing is produced by manual grooming. Animal A grooms animal B, and B later shares food with A but does not groom him. A ‘food- sharing’ arrangement is, then, a social relationship that happens to include the expectation of asymmetrical grooming and food-sharing. Vocal grooming, Dunbar (1996) argued, is now used by modern humans for similar purposes. There is no shortage of evidence that in humans, both manual and vocal behaviour are used towards similar ends (Hall 1996; Locke 1998a; 1998b; Sugawara 1984; 1990). Mutual reciprocity is a core feature of the social networks of hunter- gatherers (see Wiessner 1982).To join a network, something of value must be given to a current member. If reciprocated, an exchange relationship forms. This enables either party to go to the other when needing something that cannot be hunted or gathered at the moment. JOHN L. LOCKE 45

The networks involve exchanging, and yet the relationships within the network are maintained by talking. The !Kung of southwest Africa spend no more than 12 to 15 hours per week actually procuring and preparing food, with much of the remaining time dedicated to discussions of ‘who had what and did or did not give it to whom’ (Wiessner 1982: 68).

Proximate factors As we have seen, individuals without language – the non-linguistic monkeys and apes, the pre-linguistic human infant – are able to use vocalization to negotiate their way within social groups. This is not to say, of course, that members of either group are consciously aware of the semantic force of the displays and other social signals that they systematically manipulate. To the contrary, it can be argued that the only reason such behaviours appear so early and universally in development is precisely because no protracted period of learning or self-reﬂection is required (Locke 1999; Locke & Pearson 1992). But if hominids deployed their voice without conscious knowledge or intent, what were the causal mechanisms?

V   My suggestion is that proximate factors caused hominids to vocalize in circumstances in which it would have been adaptive to do so, but that they were guided in this by endogenous factors. In both monkeys and humans, an association has been identified between fluctuations in social rank and variations in the level of a specific hormone, serotonin. High-ranking individuals typically register high serotonin levels. The elevations and depressions of animals’ ranks tend to be accompanied by parallel changes in their serotonin levels. When serotonin stimulants are administered, rank tends to rise (Madsen 1985; 1986; Raleigh, McGuire, Brammer, Pollack & Yuwiler 1991; Raleigh, McGuire, Brammer & Yuwiler 1984).

V   Proximate factors also affect relationships. Barry Keverne and his colleagues have found that manual grooming – as we saw earlier, an important means of servicing social relationships in non-human primates – increases beta- endorphin levels in the cerebrospinal fluid of monkeys (Fabre-Nys, Meller & Keverne 1982; Martel, Nevison, Rayment, Simpson & Keverne 1993; Martel, Nevison, Simpson & Keverne 1995; Martensz, Vellucci, Keverne & Herbert 1986). Predictably, administration of an opiate receptor blockade, naltrexone, significantly increases grooming and solicitations to be groomed. In our own species, administration of opiates increases a feeling of what has been called ‘group belonging’ (cf. McGuire & Troisi 1998). One might speculate that, in some cases, individuals vocalize or speak in order to achieve a feeling of well- being and in the process, without specific intent to do so, achieve emotional states and social relationships that work to their benefit. 46 JOHN L. LOCKE

Messages in the medium As for the medium itself, there is no reason to assume that the vocal grooms of hominids would have been less variegated in form, or ‘conversational’ in manner, than the girneys and other intimate vocalizations of vervets and geladas (Hauser 1992; Richman 1987). Enlargement of hominid groups would have increased social proximity, a circumstance that favours perception of continuously graded displays (cf. Smith 1977), enhancing the discriminability of subtle sound variations. When hominids began to use variegated, pragmatically intoned utterances in a socially regulatory way, the foundations were laid for a language that would be rendered phonetically. Individuals could put content in their vocal grooms, that is, they could vocally request, reject, and so on with an enhanced degree of speciﬁcity.The basis for competing with one’s contemporaries would thus have shifted to, or come to include, the quality of information that could be shared. Those routinely holding surplus food presumably required little additional knowledge about food acquisition, but they and all others would have beneﬁted from information about the activities, intentions, and personal characteristics of group members. Henceforth, I assume, knowing something that others did not increased one’s ability to compete, through the medium of speech, for rank and relationships. When hominids spoke, they did so because it would alter what their listeners thought about, aware that if they did it well, it would alter what their listeners thought about them.

NOTES

This article is adapted from a paper delivered at the Second Evolution of Language Conference, University of East London, April, 1998. 1 Ironically, Bickerton (1998) himself argued later that grammatical language emerged ‘catastrophically’ from an earlier capacity for proto-language or from no linguistic capacity at all.

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Rang et rapports sociaux dans l’évolution de la parole

Résumé Si les bénéfices du langage pour l’évolution furent principalement référentiels, comme de nombreux théoriciens le présument, il faut alors postuler l’existence d’un stade préparatoire au cours duquel un ‘appétit’ pour l’information, qui n’est pas évident chez les autres primates, se serait développé. Jusqu’à présent, aucun stade de ce type n’a été démontré. Cepen- dant, le problème s’estompe si l’on assume que le langage a émergé à partir d’une fonction plus étroitement partagée avec d’autres primates. La fonction la plus plausible est la parade. J’avance ici que les fonctions performatives associées avec la production de sons oraux fournirent les pressions initiales pour la communication vocale par leur promotion du rang et des rapports sociaux. Ces bénéfices, selon moi, facilitèrent l’évasion et la résolution des conflits, la collaboration et le partage réciproque des ressources requises. En valorisant les applications performatives du langage, qui continuent chez les humains modernes, on peut plus facilement dériver la parole des comportements sociaux-vocaux des primates non- humains et de la sorte offrir plus de continuité dans les compte-rendus de l’évolution du langage.

Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RQ. The author is also afﬁliated to the Department of Human Communication Sciences at the University of Shefﬁeld. [email protected]