Stephen C. Levinson is Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and author of over 400 publications on language, culture and cognition. He holds an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University, is the recipient the 2020 Huxley Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and he is a fellow of the British Academy, the Academia Europaea, and the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

• 1. The role of social interaction in the human 'carrying capacity' for language and culture; 2. Human communication and the interaction engine; 3. Universal properties of interaction; 4. Origin of the interaction engine; 5. The interaction engine and social life; 6. Conclusions.

'In this brilliant and original book, Stephen Levinson pulls the way we look at language inside out, and shows that rather than lying at the core of being human, it is the outcome of a much stronger drive - the ubiquity of human social interactions.' Robert Foley, Leverhulme Professor of Human Evolution Emeritus, Fellow of King's College, Cambridge