Dance, Language And The Brain

This paper explores the relationship between dance and language in the light of recent findings from linguistics, cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. I will argue that at a formal level of sentence construction dance and language share many characteristics, but that the analogy breaks down at the level of meaning, reference, truth and function. With this in mind, I will argue that dance and language build on a shared cognitive architecture and may have a joint evolutionary origin. Finally, I will show how the analysis of language may be put to creative use.