ABSTRACT
Even a cursory look at the literature on animal communication reveals that, on a dominant view, the theoretical task of explaining the evolution of linguistic meaning is to be understood in (at least roughly) Gricean terms. After raising some difficulties for the Gricean approach to the emergence of meaning, I will motivate an alternative conception of the explanatory task, which focuses on the potential of non-Gricean, expressive communication for illuminating the origins of meaning. This conception not only seems ethologically plausible and philosophically cogent, but it also renders the puzzle of language evolution more tractable by treating meaningfulness as a multifaceted phenomenon with potentially divergent evolutionary roots.
