Based on Buber’s dialogic philosophy, ideas from the ethics of dialogue and politeness theory, we analyze letters written by members of an Israeli organization named Besod Siach – who come from both the left and right wings, are both religious and secular, who decided to broaden and deepen the dialogue between different groups in Israeli society against the backdrop of the polarization, alienation and violence threatening the state’s integrity and democratic foundations.

There is not enough reason to believe that syllables are primary in speech and evolved from the cyclic movements of chewing. There are many differences between chewing and speech and it is equally plausible that what is primary in speech is a succession of auditorily robust modulations of various acoustic parameters (amplitude, periodicity, spectrum, pitch); syllables could have evolved from this.

Many species' non-threat facial expression involves an open mouth and retracted lip corners – the smile. This served to make an accompanying vocalization sound like it originated from a smaller vocalizer. That such signals are deceptive and benefit primarily the signaler undermines the notion that the perception of the smile employs embodied simulation of the smiler's state.

Like non-verbal communication, paralinguistic communication is rooted in anatomical and physiological factors. Paralinguistic form-meaning relations arise from the way these affect speech production, with some fine-tuning by the cultural and linguistic context. The effects have been classified as “biological codes,” following the terminological lead of John Ohala's Frequency Code. Intonational morphemes, though arguably non-arbitrary in principle, are in fact heavily biased toward these paralinguistic meanings. Paralinguistic and linguistic meanings for four biological codes are illustrated. In addition to the Frequency (...) Code, the Effort Code, and the Respiratory Code, the Sirenic Code is introduced here, which is based on the use of whispery phonation, widely seen as being responsible for the signaling and perception of feminine attractiveness and sometimes used to express interrogativity in language. In the context of the evolution of language, the relations between physiological conditions and the resulting paralinguistic and linguistic meanings will need to be clarified. (shrink)