Przemysław Żywiczyński

Nicolaus Copernicus University | umk · Center Language Evolution Studies

This study explores how inter-turn speech pauses influence the perception of cognitive states such as knowledge, confidence, and willingness to grant requests in conversational settings. Longer pauses are typically associated with lower competence and willingness, but Matzinger et al. (2023) discovered that this attribution varies when non-native s...

An important quality to assess in others is their cooperativeness. We hypothesized that people use linguistic markers in their partners’ speech as a proxy of their cooperativeness in other tasks: specifically, we predicted that participants would prefer syntactically similar conversation partners as cooperation partners in a monetary game. We found...

Our study delves into the intricacies of human conversation within the framework of evolutionary psychology, focusing on the proportion of “social” to “non-social” topics in casual conversation. Building upon the seminal study by Dunbar et al. (1997), which posited that two-thirds of conversation gravitates around social matters, our findings indic...

A commonly held assumption is that demonstration and pantomime differ from ordinary action in that the movements are slowed down and exaggerated to be better understood by intended receivers. This claim has, however, been based on meagre empirical support. This article provides direct evidence that the different functional demands of demonstration...

Pantomime is a unique form of communication, which we improvise “on the fly” to transmit information when unable to use language, for example during intercultural contacts or when the use of language is blocked or constrained, as in the case of some medical conditions or the game of charades. Pantomimic communication has been investigated from a nu...

Pantomime is a unique form of communication, which we improvise “on the fly” to transmit information when unable to use language, for example during intercultural contacts or when the use of language is blocked or constrained, as in the case of some medical conditions or the game of charades. Pantomimic communication has been investigated from a nu...

Pantomime is a unique form of communication, which we improvise “on the fly” to transmit information when unable to use language, for example during intercultural contacts or when the use of language is blocked or constrained, as in the case of some medical conditions or the game of charades. Pantomimic communication has been investigated from a nu...

Pantomime is a means of bodily visual communication that is based on iconic gestures that are not fully conventional. It has become a key element in many models of language evolution and a strong candidate for the original human-specific communicative system (Zlatev et al. 2020). Although pantomime affords successful communication in many contexts,...

Experimental Semiotics (ES) is the study of novel forms of communication that communicators develop in laboratory tasks whose designs prevent them from using language. Thus, ES relates to pragmatics in a “pure,” radical sense, capturing the process of creating the relation between signs and their interpreters as biological, psychological, and socia...

The last three decades have brought a wealth of new empirical data and methods that have transformed investigations of language evolution into a fast-growing field of scientific research. In this paper, we investigate how the results of this research are represented in the content of the most popular introductory linguistic textbooks. We carried ou...

An important quality to assess in others is their cooperativeness. Since linguistic communication requires a high degree of cooperation between interaction partners, we hypothesized that people use linguistic markers in their partners’ speech as a proxy of their cooperativeness in other tasks. Specifically, we predicted that participants would pref...

Several lines of research within developmental psychology, experimental semiotics and language origins studies have recently converged in their interest in pantomime as a system of bodily communication distinct from both language (spoken or signed) and nonlinguistic gesticulation. These approaches underscore the effectiveness of pantomime, which de...

Language evolution is a modern incarnation of a long intellectual tradition that addresses the fundamental question of how language began. Such a formulation is intuitively obvious, but a more precise characterisation of this area of research with its central notions—language and evolution—has proved surprisingly elusive. In this paper, we show how...

We applaud Heintz & Scott-Phillips's guiding metaphor of "unleashing leashed expression," and we value the unified explanation for the emergence of not only language, but also other forms of unleashed expression, such as multimodal communication. We are more critical of the authors' discussion of the selection pressures acting towards unleashed exp...

Speech pauses between turns of conversations are crucial for assessing conversation partners’ cognitive states, such as their knowledge, confidence and willingness to grant requests; in general, speakers making longer pauses are regarded as less apt and willing. However, it is unclear if the interpretation of pause length is mediated by the accent...

Experimental Semiotics (ES) is the study of "novel forms of communication which people develop when they cannot use pre-established communication" (Galantucci 2012). Thus, it tackles pragmatics in a “pure”, radical sense, capturing the process of creating the relation between signs and their interpreters as biological, psychological, and social bei...

Buddhist schools of thought share two fundamental assumptions about language. On the one hand, language (śabda) is identified with conceptual thinking (kalpanā), which according to the Buddhist doctrine (dharma) separates us from the momentary and fleeting nature of reality (satya, “truth”). Language is comprised of generally applicable forms, whic...

Gestural and pantomimic accounts of language origins propose that language did not develop directly from ape vocalisations, but rather that its emergence was preceded by an intervening stage of bodily-visual communication, during which our ancestors communicated with their hands, arms, and the entire body. Gestural and pantomimic scenarios are agai...

We study an extended version of a sender–receiver signaling game—a context-signaling (CS) game that involves external contextual cues that provide information about a sender’s private information state. A formal evolutionary analysis of the investigated CS game shows that ambiguous signaling strategies can achieve perfect information transfer and a...

Tematyce języka, czasu i przestrzeni poświęcono w literaturze polskiej i światowej bardzo dużo uwagi, zwłaszcza w ujęciu interdyscyplinarnym. Prace zebrane w niniejszym tomie wskazują na różne, nierzadko bardzo metaforyczne, sposoby pojmowania czasu i przestrzeni w szerokiej perspektywie lingwistycznej. Poszczególne rozdziały koncentrują się na wyb...

Politeness in conversation is a fascinating aspect of human interaction that directly interfaces language use and human social behavior more generally. We show how game theory, as a higher-order theory of behavior, can provide the tools to understand and model polite behavior. The recently proposed responsibility exchange theory (Chaudhry and Loewe...

This study addresses the postulate of non-conventionality of pantomime, inherent in pantomimic scenarios of language origin. Since lack of semiotic conventions does not preclude micro-conventions resulting from cultural differences, pantomimes should be easier to interpret when the actor and recipient share the same culture than between two differe...

Tematyce języka, czasu i przestrzeni poświęcono w literaturze polskiej i światowej bardzo dużo uwagi, zwłaszcza w ujęciu interdyscyplinarnym. Prace zebrane w niniejszym tomie wskazują na różne, nierzadko bardzo metaforyczne, sposoby pojmowania czasu i przestrzeni w szerokiej perspektywie lingwistycznej. Poszczególne rozdziały koncentrują się na wyb...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

Many controversies in language evolution research derive from the fact that language is itself a natural language word, which makes the underlying concept fuzzy and cumbersome, and a common perception is that progress in language evolution research is hindered because researchers do not ‘talk about the same thing’. In this article, we claim that ag...

Bodily mimesis, the capacity to use the body representationally, was one of the key innovations that allowed early humans to go beyond the ‘baseline’ of generalized ape communication and cognition. We argue that the original human-specific communication afforded by bodily mimesis was based on signs that involve three entities: an expression that re...

The horizontal size of the exposed depigmented sclera in Caucasians has been previously suggested to be sexually dimorphic, and the significance of this phenomenon remains unclear. Here we build on a previous study and extend it by (i) examining sex differences in other measures of ocular morphology and (ii) exploring the link between eye morpholog...

We propose reframing one of the key questions in the field of language evolution as what was the original human-specific communicative system? With the help of cognitive semiotics, first we clarify the difference between signals, which characterize animal communication, and signs, which do not replace but complement signals in human communication....

Since its inception in the second part of the 20th century, the science of language evolution has been exerting a growing and formative pressure on linguistics. More obviously, given its interdisciplinary character, the science of language evolution provides a platform on which linguists can meet and discuss a variety of problems pertaining to the...

Daniel Dennett is one of the giants of contemporary philosophy. His new book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back, does reiterates the old motifs, such as “strange inversion of reasoning” or “production without comprehension”. But it isfirst and foremost a new project, whose goal is to calibrate the theory of universalDarwinism to the very recent develo...

Impairments of motor representation of actions have been reported as a core component of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Individuals with ASD have difficulties in a number of functions such as assuming anticipatory postures, imitating body movements, producing and understanding gestures, and recognizing motor intentions. Such cognitive-motor abili...

Linguistic Politeness (LP) is a fascinating domain of language, as it directly interfaces with human social behavior. Here, we show how game theory, as a higher-order theory of behavior, can provide the tools to understand and model LP phenomena. We show this for the specific case of requests, where the magnitude of request and the resultant Rate o...

In this paper, we complement proximate or ‘how’ explanations for the origins of language, broadening our perspective to include fitness-consequences explanations, i.e. ultimate, or ‘why’ explanations. We identify the platform of trust as a fundamental prerequisite for the development of a language-like system of symbolic communication. The platform...

Understanding the adaptive function of the unique morphology of the human eye, in particular its overexposed white sclera, may have profound implications for the fields of evolutionary behavioural science, and specifically the areas of human interaction and social cognition. Existing hypotheses, such as the cooperative eye hypothesis, have attracte...

Although pantomimic scenarios recur in the most important historical as well as current accounts of language origins, a serious problem is the lack of a commonly accepted definition of “pantomime”. We scrutinise several areas of study, from theatre studies to semiotics to primatology, pointing to the differences in use that may give rise to misunde...

A persistent controversy in language evolution research has been whether language emerged in the gestural-visual or in the vocal-auditory modality. A “dialectic” solution to this age-old debate has now been gaining ground: language was fully multimodal from the start, and remains so to this day. In this paper, we show this solution to be too simpli...

Turn-taking – the coordinated and efficient transition between the roles of sender and receiver in communication – is a fundamental property of conversational interaction. The turn-taking mechanism depends on a variety of linguistic factors related to syntax, semantics and prosody, which have recently been subject to vigorous research. This contras...

Self-touching behaviors – such as scratching one’s cheek or rubbing one’s nose – are typically accounted for in terms of self-regulation, such as coping with negative affect (e.g. Ekman and Friesen 1969) or disruptions of attention (e.g.), but there are also lines of research indicating that self-touching plays a supportive role in the dynamics of...

This article introduces a special issue on mechanisms in language evolution research. It describes processes relevant for the emergence of protolanguage and the transition thereof to modern language. Protolanguage is one of the key terms in the field of language evolution, used to designate a hypothesised intermediate stage in the emergence of lang...

The cooperative character of language is an empirical fact and one of the key tenets in linguistics. However, this cooperative character is what makes it evolutionarily suspect: under normal circumstances sharing honest information with biologically unrelated individuals and without any obvious costs is not an ESS (evolutionarily stable strategy) a...

In everyday circumstances, humans use a variety of cues to draw rich inferences about the nature of interaction. Among these, we focus on sequences of self-regulatory movements, such as touching behaviours and postural changes, that have long been related to interpersonal coordination understood both in terms of mimicry and synchrony. So far, there...

Why is language unique? How and why did it emerge? Such questions are emblematic of the Western intellectual tradition, and while some even today see them as intractable, a majority consider the problem of language origins as difficult but possible to address scientifically: “the hardest problem in science”. Such questions are the domain of languag...

The age-old debate between the proponents of the gesture-first and speech-first positions has returned to occupy a central place in current language evolution theorizing. The gestural scenarios, suffering from the problem known as “modality transition” (why a gestural system would have changed into a predominantly spoken system), frequently appeal...

Despite the vigorous development of language evolution research over the last three decades, very little of this progress has trickled into teaching linguistics: so far this important area of the academy has failed to accommodate the bulk of the empirical and theoretical advances. In this paper we report the results of a survey of fourteen popular...

Linguistic politeness (LP) refers to the set of “linguistic features mediating norms of social behaviour, in relation to such notions as courtesy, rapport, deference and distance” (Crystal 2008). Although researchers (e.g. Eelen 2001, Watts 2003) agree that it is intimately connected to normativity, group hierarchy and cooperation – the core questi...

Why is language unique? How did language come about? When did this happen? Those questions, although quite emblematic of the Western intellectual tradition since its ancient beginnings, so far have not found satisfying answers. Indeed, many still question the very possibility of addressing those basic problems of language origins with proper scient...

In our paper we review the gestural primacy hypotheses in languageevolution, starting with the discussion of the historical advocates of this ap-proach and concluding with the contemporary arguments, derived from empiricalresearch in various fields of study. Assessing the strengths and weaknesses ofthe gestural scenarios we point to their main prob...

The so-called gestural theories of language origins have remained a central focus of language evolution research for at least a decade. Despite important differences, their varieties underscore the significance of visual, as opposed to vocal, channel of signal transmission. However, language is predominantly spoken; that is (excluding recent techno...

The set of design features developed by Charles Hockett in the 1950s and 1960s remains probably the most influential means of juxtaposing animal communication with human language. However, the general theoretical perspective of Hockett is largely incompatible with that of modern language evolution research. Consequently, we argue that his classific...

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The issue of signal reliability ('honesty') is widely recognised in language evolution research as one of the most fundamental problems concerning the evolutionary emergence of protolanguage, i.e. early language-like communication. We propose that nonverbal communication is likely to have played an important but underestimated role in language evol...

The emergence of the uniquely human ability to acquire and use language has invariably been perceived as a problem that is both exceptionally difficult and intriguing. Conjectures regarding the sources of language have never been in short supply, substantiating some of the mistrust in the purposefulness of this type of study. The earliest manifesta...

It should be admitted that the view on the development of linguistic politeness laid out in this article is couched in very hypothetical terms. To go beyond the postulative character of this proposal, it is necessary to further investigate politeness phenomena themselves as well as their relation to proxemic operations. First of all, the universali...

The heterogeneous category of phenomena covered by the term body language (roughly equivalent to nonverbal communication, NVC), although essential to human day-to-day communication, is also largely dissociable from human verbal behaviour. As such, it has received little attention in the area of evolution of language research. In this paper we point...