@article{jbp:/content/journals/10.1075/is.9.1.05des, author = "Dessalles, Jean-Louis", title = "From metonymy to syntax in the communication of events", journal= "Interaction Studies", year = "2008", volume = "9", number = "1", pages = "51-65", doi = "https://doi.org/10.1075/is.9.1.05des", url = "https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/is.9.1.05des", publisher = "John Benjamins", issn = "1572-0373", type = "Journal Article", keywords = "protolanguage", keywords = "relevance", keywords = "compositionality", keywords = "metonymy", keywords = "pragmatics", keywords = "evolution", abstract = "A modular analysis of spontaneous language use provides support for the existence of an identifiable step in language evolution, protolanguage. Our suggestion is that a grammarless form of expression would have evolved to signal unexpected events, a behavior still prevalent in our species. 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.", }