Narration and reasoning, from structure to biological function

What is it about?

Human conversation has a particular structure that bears no resemblance with any other known communication system. People’s spontaneous talking comes in two forms: narratives and collective argumentative reasoning. This characteristic conversational structure cannot be fortuitous. Conversation is a costly behaviour, if only by the time and energy it demands. Surprisingly, there have been few attempts to relate conversational structure to any biological function it may have. This chapter illustrates conversational structure with examples and explores the issue of its biological purpose.

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