The cultural evolution of speech act norms

Abstract After characterizing the notions of information, signal, and verbal signal, we note that since its inception in the mid-twentieth century, speech act theory has been carried on with little attention to how speech acts might have come about in the evolution of communication. We then explain some of the central ideas of cultural evolutionary theory. In that light we sketch a cultural-evolutionary account of the modern practice of assertions, and offer a similar though more compact reconstruction for the evolution of imperatives. If these reconstructions are plausible, they suggest that assertoric and directive practices are adaptive in the communities in which they occur. They are therefore not arbitrary, contrary to one commitment incurred by conventionalist approaches to speech acts.