Chapters in this book

1. Prelim pages i
2. Table of contents vii
3. Introduction 1
4. Section one. Evolutionary precursors 11
5. Chapter 1. Monkeys’ mirror neurons 13
6. Chapter 2. Chimpanzees and the visual field of the conspecific 37
7. Section two. The basic human ability 47
8. Chapter 3. The three modes of processing the eyes of others 49
9. Chapter 4. Pointing gestures 61
10. Chapter 5. Four-hand co-operative actions and children’s interpersonal co-ordination games 79
11. Section three. Specifying some necessary requisites of language 89
12. Chapter 6. Saussurean parity and the perception of a radically not-own self 91
13. Chapter 7. About evocation 105
14. Chapter 8. Symbolic play 113
15. Chapter 9. From symbolic play to linguistic symbol 137
16. Section four. The origin of predication and syntax 159
17. Chapter 10. From the general exposition to the crucial requisite achieved by the protodeclarative 161
18. Chapter 11. Toward the original perception of false beliefs of others 177
19. Chapter 12. Between motor learning and the perception of beliefs of others 189
20. Section five. Pregrammatical, theme-rheme syntax 203
21. Chapter 13. From beliefs of others to communicative predication 205
22. Chapter 14. Revisiting Frege 219
23. Chapter 15. Communicative functions, Vygotskian ‘pure predicate’ and conceptual semantics 229
24. Chapter 16. Connecting with the concepts of theme (or topic) and rheme (or comment) 239
25. Section six. From original to present-day predication 255
26. Chapter 17. Meaning and the different types of link 257
27. Chapter 18. Expressive speech and syntactic links 271
28. Chapter 19. Historical grammaticalisation 303
29. Section seven. Syntax beyond predication 315
30. Chapter 20. Interrogative communication 317
31. Chapter 21. Toward complex syntax 337
32. Preliminary conclusion and the main thesis recapitulated 359
33. References 363
34. Glossary 391
35. Author index 395
36. Subject index 401