We’re delighted to share that ECOM Director Dorit Bar-On’s new book, Expression, Communication, and Origins of Meaning, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in December 2026.
The book asks how human language evolved from animal communication, and offers a new answer to what Bar-On calls the “first hard problem” of language evolution: explaining how meaningful communication could emerge at all. Drawing on philosophy of language and mind alongside linguistics, ethology, biology, and cognitive psychology, she argues that human languages and animal communication systems, despite their syntactic and semantic differences, share deep pragmatic continuities, and traces a path from one to the other via an intermediate protolanguage.
It’s exactly the kind of interdisciplinary work ECOM was built around, and we’re proud to see it heading into print. Available for pre-order now, with publication expected December 3, 2026.
