Abstract
Animals across a broad range of species convey meaning through their communicative behavior. The meaning we convey in our use of human language must be seen as jointly contributed by the semantics of the words, phrases, and sentences employed and the pragmatics of the situation in which the communication occurs. Much discussion of animal communicative behavior has sought to analyze it by attributing semantic content to particular signals: such an approach, for instance, characterizes the treatment of vervet monkey alarm calls as “functionally referential.” Some scholars have offered a formal semantics for the signaling behavior of other monkeys. In contrast, a growing trend in the animal behavior literature rejects the attribution of properly semantic content to such signals, arguing that the meaning they convey should be attributed to their pragmatic value in particular contexts. Following a review of the known properties of animal communication systems, the applicability of this account is assessed in terms of the partitioning of semantics and pragmatics proposed by Moeschler and others.
Portions of this material have been presented in classes at Yale University and in talks at a variety of institutions—most recently, at the University of Queensland on 10 March, 2015 and as an inaugural lecture for the Reseau Thématique “Langage & Communication” at the University of Geneva on 1 October, 2015. Comments and suggestions from the audiences on these various occasions are gratefully acknowledged.
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Notes
- 1.
Or gestures, in the case of signed languages.
- 2.
I ignore here what is arguably a third distinct system, that of morphology, which characterizes the ways in which words with complex meanings combine the formal markers that signal parts of those meanings.
- 3.
Both “hok” and “krak,” as well as elaborations of these, are also used in some non-predation contexts, but the focus of Schlenker et al.’s (2014) analysis is on their association with predators. These facts are difficult to reconcile with any claim that “hok” and “krak” have lexical meanings that refer to predators, however.
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Anderson, S.R. (2017). The Place of Human Language in the Animal World. In: Blochowiak, J., Grisot, C., Durrleman, S., Laenzlinger, C. (eds) Formal Models in the Study of Language. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48832-5_18
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