The relations of demonstration and pantomime to causal reasoning and event cognition

Abstract

Abstract This article deals with the role of showing in the evolution of human communication and how it has developed into telling. When a communicator is showing, she is performing, not just doing. Demonstration is a combination of doing and showing, while pantomime is only showing. I make a distinction between pantomime used for teaching and pantomime for communication and argue that this is central for the transition from showing to telling. Telling involves describing an event or a series of events. The evolutionary question then becomes: Which selective forces made hominins extend their communication from doing to showing and then to telling? My answer is that showing and, to a larger degree, telling require advanced forms of causal cognition and event representation that are not found in other species. I analyze how event cognition is relevant for demonstration and pantomime and how this type of cognition influences the structure of language.

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