The Interaction Engine
Language in Social Life and Human Evolution
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Product details:
- Publisher Cambridge University Press
- Date of Publication 19 June 2025
- ISBN 9781009570329
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages216 pages
- Size 236x159x18 mm
- Weight 450 g
- Language English 790
Categories
Short description:
Communicative interaction rules our lives. This book, from a field-leading scholar, shows us how this works, and how it evolved.
MoreLong description:
Communicative interaction forms the core of human experience. In this fascinating book Levinson, one of the world's leading scholars in the field, explores how human communicative interaction is structured, the demands it puts on our cognitive processing, and how its system evolved out of continuities with other primate systems. It celebrates the role of the 'interaction engine' which drives our social interaction, not only in human life, but also in the evolution of our species - showing how exchanges such as words, glances, laughter and face-to-face encounters bring us our greatest and most difficult experiences, and have come to define what it means to be human. It draws extensively on the author's fieldwork with speakers across multiple cultures and communities, and was inspired by his own experiences during the Covid lockdown, when humans were starved of the very social interaction that shapes our lives. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
'In this brilliant and original book, Stephen Levinson pulls the way we look at language inside out, and shows that rather than lying at the core of being human, it is the outcome of a much stronger drive - the ubiquity of human social interactions.' Robert Foley, Leverhulme Professor of Human Evolution Emeritus, Fellow of King's College, Cambridge
Table of Contents:
1. The role of social interaction in the human 'carrying capacity' for language and culture; 2. Human communication and the interaction engine; 3. Universal properties of interaction; 4. Origin of the interaction engine; 5. The interaction engine and social life; 6. Conclusions.
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