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Article Dans Une Revue Interaction Studies Année : 2008

From metonymy to syntax in the communication of events

Résumé

Language, from its early hominin origin to now, was not primarily being used for practical purposes. We suggest that an essential function of protolanguage was to signal 'noteworthy' events, as humans still systematically do. Words could not be so specific as to refer to whole, non-recurring, situations. They referred to elements such as objects or locations, and the communicated event was inferred metonymically. Compositionality was achieved, without syntax, through multi-metonymy, as words referring to elements of the same situation were concatenated into proto-utterances.
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Dates et versions

hal-00616424 , version 1 (22-08-2011)

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  • HAL Id : hal-00616424 , version 1

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Jean-Louis Dessalles. From metonymy to syntax in the communication of events. Interaction Studies, 2008, 9 (1), pp.51-65. ⟨hal-00616424⟩
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