title:	The Emergence of Metacommunicative Meaning
author(s):	Jonathan Ginzburg
affiliation:
time and place:	Monday, 14.00 - 16.45, room A In the thematic session on Semantics and Cognition
abstract:	The issue of how human language evolved is commonly taken to reduce to the issue of how *grammar* has evolved. *Grammar* is taken to be, essentially, a disembodied system of expressions with a compositional semantics. In this talk I will argue for the need to consider a somewhat different perspective on evolution and ontogeny, one where grammar is taken to be a system of types of spatio-temporally located speech events, embedded within a system of information states of interacting agents. I will adduce a number of motivations for this: first, certain semantic phenomena characteristic of mature adult linguistic competence can only be described within the latter type of approach. A striking example of this are the readings displayed by fragments used to acknowledge understanding or request clarification of an utterance made by a previous interlocuter. These constitute an instance of semantic complexity that arises without concomitant syntactic complexity. Second, by considering language as a property of a communicative interaction system one can distinguish between the contingently existing communicative system of a given species of agents and the potential competence of this species. This is clearly true for human neonates, but is also relevant with respect to evidence of (limited) language learning among primates. Third, such an approach is required in order to account for some fundamental characteristics of how certain metacommunicative meaning actually emerges, for instance the ubiquity of partial repetition by novices of competent speakers' utterances.