Stories come first. The origins of human communication from a naturalised perspective of language.

Within the framework of cognitive science, a naturalised model of language must pass the test of both cognitive and evolutionary plausibility. Underlying this paper is the idea that the theme of the ori-gins of language is the litmus test through which the cognitive and evolutionary plausibility of a model of language,and thus its possibility of naturalisation, can be assessed. Specifically, in this paper, two models of language are examined. The first, focused on the propositional character of thought, is the basis of a conception of language founded on the primacy ofthe sentence and on the computational architectures used to process the sentence; the second, centred on the narrative foundation of thought, is the basis of a conception of language that sees in discourse and in the computational systems that process theplot and character of stories the constitutive trait of human communication. From the point of view of the topic of origins, the result of the analysis of the first model is negative, since the reference to sentence syntax does not turn out to be the feature of language from which to describe the starting point of human communica-tion. The narrative model of the origin of language, on the contrary, offers a perspective of origins in line with both cognitive and evolutionary plausibility. The latter model, therefore, appears to be congruent with a naturalised perspective of human language