In the past few years, the Pragmatics & Cognition team has been mainly concerned by human social cognition, from linguistic or non-linguistic communication to perceptive and memory-based recognition of faces and emotions.

In the coming years, these themes will be pursued from the viewpoint of the passage between situated or embodied cognition (shared between human and nonhuman animals) and nonsituated or abstract cognition (which, though not restricted to humans, is more developed in humans, where it seems at least in part linked to language). Continuing the work done on language evolution, we will look into different aspects of both conceptualization and language and linguistic communication, with the aim of investigating how nonsituated and abstract cognition may arise from situated and embodied cognition. More specifically, the interface between semantics and syntax on the one hand and pragmatics on the other hand, as well as the use of language in communication seem promising fields in which to investigate the respective roles of situated and nonsituated processes in social and nonsocial cognition.