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Primate Semantics
(LINGUAE, Institut Jean-Nicod, CNRS; New York University)
(LSCP, CNRS)
Cogmaster, January 2018 (LC2)
Instructors: Philippe Schlenker
Directeur de Recherche, Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris; Global Distinguished Professor, New York University
Advanced Grant Leader, ERC
E-mail: philippe.schlenker@gmail.com
Directeur de Recherche, LSCP, Paris
Starting Grant Leader, ERC
E-mail: em.chemla@gmail.com
Teaching Assistant: Jeremy Kuhn, post-doctoral fellow, Institut Jean-Nicod
E-mail: jeremy.d.kuhn@gmail.com
Topic
In the last 30 years, field experiments in primatology have yielded rich data on the morphology, syntax and semantics of primate alarm calls. To give but one (particularly rich) example: Ouattara et al. 2009a, b suggested that male Campbell's monkey calls (i) involve 4 roots (krak, hok, wak, boom), (ii) one suffix (-oo) which attaches to 3 of the roots (yielding krak-oo, hok-oo, wak-oo), and (iii) possibly one clear syntactic rule (boom appears sentence-initially); we will further suggest on the basis of more recent data that (iv) an explicit semantics can be devised for these calls, and that (v) it can account for apparent cases of dialectal variation among Campbell's monkeys. The goal of these sessions is to (i) review recent results on the communication systems of primates, especially monkeys, and (ii) to apply tools from formal semantics and pragmatics to them. This methodological goal is largely independent from the issue of the evolutionary connection between human language and these other communication systems – although in the long run detailed analyses of their formal properties should help illuminate the evolutionary question. On a substantive level, we will argue that a precise delineation of the division of labor among semantics, pragmatics, and ecology/world knowledge holds the key to several primate languages.
Requirements
Besides active class participation:
(i) read the assigned papers;
(ii) short exercises will be assigned.
Honor Code
To encourage learning and discussion, the use of phones, tablets or computers is strongly discouraged during class, unless it involves taking notes and referring to writings assigned for the class (in which case all other applications should be closed).
[Summary of some data on this topic]
Discussing homeworks with classmates
You are allowed to discuss homework assignments with your classmates. But in case you engage in substantive discussions of solutions:
(i) you must indicate in your write-up the names of classmates with which you discussed solutions in some depth, and
(ii) you must write up your answers to the assignment by yourself. Under no circumstances are you to share typed-up answers to the assignments or to discuss the actual write-ups.
Slides, Problem Sets and Readings: they will be made available in this Dropbox folder.
Main reading: Schlenker et al. 2016, Formal Monkey Linguistics, Theoretical Linguistics
Summary: Schlenker et al. 2016, What do Monkey Calls Mean? Trends in Cognitive Sciences
or for a slightly more detailed encyclopedia-style article: [LingBuzz]
Optional:
Sauerland 2016, On the Definition of Sentence, Theoretical Linguistics
Schlenker et al. 2016, Formal Monkey Linguistics: the Debate, Theoretical Linguistics
Also useful:
Summary on Formal Monkey Linguistics (with links)
Q&A note on 'Monkey Semantics'
Relevant as well: Stanislas Dehaene's course on 'Origines du langage et singularité de l'espèce humaine', starting January 8, 2018.
Sessions (still tentative; to be adapted as we go)
Monday, January 15, 2018
[last session]
Monday, January 8, 2018
Introduction. Campbell's monkeys [no TA session, but please keep the 3rd hour open]
Main Reading: Schlenker et al. 2016, Formal Monkey Linguistics, Theoretical Linguistics
Optional Readings:
-Zuberbühler 2009
-Schlenker et al. 2014 ('Monkey Semantics')
(Campbell's calls): Ouattara et al. 2009a and Ouattara et al. 2009b: less recent and less formal than Schlenker et al. 2014
(bird grammar): Berwick et al. 2011
Links:
Radio program with a discussion of alarm calls in primates [France Inter, in French]
Vervets and calls [BBC]
Vervet calls [BBC]
Examples of Campbell's calls (BBC)
Problem Set #4 is now available in the Dropbox folder.
Note: the last homework is due on Friday, January 19th, 9pm.
Titi monkeys
Optional readings on Titi monkeys: Cäsar et al. 2013
For later – Readings on Apes: Hobaiter and Byrne 2011
Vocal communication in Chimpanzees: Slocombe and Zuberbühler 2010 'Signing' Chimpanzees: Rivas 2005 [for a very brief summary of work on signing apes, see the end of Jensvold 2009]. Recent advances in gestures: Hobaiter and Byrne 2014.
TA session: discuss Problem Set #3 and #4.
Links:
General presentation of long-range calls in other Titi monkeys
Going further: Putty-nosed monkeys
Main Reading: Schlenker et al. 2016, Formal Monkey Linguistics, Theoretical Linguistics
Optional Readings:
Schlenker et al. 2014 ('Pyow-Hack Revisited')
Arnold and Zuberbühler 2012.
Links:
Examples of Putty-nosed monkey calls [Nature]
Black-and-White Colobus monkeys at the St Louis zoo
Black-and-White Colobus monkeys (Guereza) in the wild
Example of a Black-and-White Colobus monkey male roar
Links
Klaus Zuberbühler's summary of Primate Communication
Tutorial on the dance language of bees
Initial References
(Some relevant articles will be made available by way of a shared Dropbox folder.)
Arnold, Kate, Lemasson, Alban, and Zuberbühler, Klaus: 2013, Population differences in combinatorial calling of wild Campbell's monkeys. Manuscript, University of St Andrews.
Arnold, Kate, Pohlner, Y., & Zuberbühler, Klaus: 2008, A forest monkeys alarm calls to predator models. Behavioral. Ecology and Sociobiology, 62, 549–559.
Arnold, Kate and Zuberbühler, Klaus: 2012, Call combinations in monkeys: Compositional or idiomatic expressions?, Brain and Language, 120, 3: 303-309, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2011.10.001.
Arnold , K & Zuberbühler , K: 2013, Female putty-nosed monkeys use experimentally altered contextual information to disambiguate the cause of male alarm calls. PLoS One , vol 8 , no. 6 , e65660 .
Berwick RC, Okanoya K, Beckers GJ, Bolhuis JJ.: 2011, Songs to Syntax: the Linguistics of Birdsongs. Trends in Cognitive Science 15(3):113-21
Cäsar, Cristiane, Byrne, Richard, Young, Robert J. and Zuberbühler, Klaus: 2012, The alarm call system of wild black-fronted titi monkeys, Callicebus nigrifrons Behav Ecol Sociobiol, 66:653–667
Cheney, Dorothy and Seyfarth, Robert: 1990, How Monkeys See The World: Inside The Mind Of Another Species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Chierchia, Gennaro, Danny Fox, and Benjamin Spector. To appear. The Grammatical View of Scalar Implicatures and the Relationship between Semantics and Pragmatics. In Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning, ed. Paul Portner, Claudia Maienborn, and Klaus von Heusinger. Berlin, NewYork: Mouton de Gruyter.
Dyer, Fred D.: 2002, The Biology of the Dance Language. Annu. Rev. Entomol. 2002. 47:917–49
Fichtel C, Kappeler P. 2002. Anti-predator behavior of group-living Malagasy primates: mixed evidence for a referential alarm call system. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 51:262–275.
Fleiss, Joseph L.: 1981, Statistical Methods for Rates and Proportions. New York: John Wiley and Sons
Gautier, Jean-Pierre: 1989, A redrawn phylogeny of guenons based upon their calls – biogeographical implications. Bioacoustics: The International Journal of Animal Sound and its Recording, 2:1, 11-21
Gautier-Hion, Annie, Colyn, Annie and Gautier, Jean-Pierre : Histoire naturelle des primates d'Afrique Centrale, ECOFAC, 1999 [pdf]
Grice, Paul: 1975, Logic and conversation. In Syntax and Semantics, 3: Speech Acts, ed. P. Cole & J. Morgan. New York: Academic Press.
Fitch, W. T., & Hauser, M. D.: 2004, Computational constraints on syntactic processing in a nonhuman primate. Science, 303, 377-380.
Hobaiter, Catherine and Byrne, Richard: 2011, The Gestural Repertoire of the Wild Chimpanzee, Anim Cogn DOI 10.1007/s10071-011-0409-2
Horn, Laurence R.: 1972, On the Semantic Properties of Logical Operators in English, PhD thesis, University of California, LA.
Lachlan R.F.: 2005, Bird song dialects. In: The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. 2nd Edition K. Brown (ed). Elsevier, Oxford UK, p. 538.
Landis, J. Richard, and Gary G. Koch: 1977, The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data. Biometrics 33: 159-174.
Lemasson, A., Glas, L., Barbu, S., Lacroix, A., Guilloux, M., Remeuf, K., Koda, H.: 2011a, Youngsters do not pay attention to conversational rules: also in nonhuman primates? Nature Scientific reports 1, 22.
Lemasson, A., & Hausberger, M.: 2011, Acoustic variability and social significance of calls in female Campbell’s monkeys (Cercopithecus campbelli campbelli). Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 129(5), 3341-3352.
Lemasson, A., Ouattara, K., Bouchet, H., Zuberbühler, K.: 2010, Speed of call delivery is related to context and caller identity in Campbell’s monkey males. Naturwissenschaften, 97, 11, 1023-1027.
Lemasson, A., Ouattara, K., Petit, E., Zuberbühler, K.: 2011b, . Social learning of vocal structure in a nonhuman primate? BMC Evolutionary Biology 11: 362.
Lemasson, A., Zuberbühler, K. & Hausberger, M.: 2005, Socially meaningful vocal plasticity in Campbell’s monkeys. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 119 (2), 220-229.
Lemasson A.: 2011, What can forest guenons « tell » us about the origin of language? In: Vilain A, Schwartz J-L, Abry C, Jauclair J, editors. Primate Communication and Human Language: Vocalisation, gestures, imitation and deixis in humans and non-humans. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 39–70.
Magri, Giorgio: 2009, A theory of individual-level predicates based on blind mandatory scalar implicatures. In Natural Language Semantics, 17.3; pp. 245-297.
Marshall, A., Wrangham, R. & Clark Arcadi, A. 1999. Does learning affect the structure of vocalizations in chimpanzees? Animal Behaviour, 58, 825-830.
Ouattara, K., Lemasson, A. & Zuberbühler, K. 2009a. Campbell’s monkeys use affixation to alter call meaning. PLoS ONE, 4, http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.
Ouattara, K., Lemasson, A. & Zuberbühler, K. 2009b. Campbell’s monkeys concatenate vocalizations into context-specific call sequences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A., 106, 51, pp. 22026-22031
Ouattara K, Zuberbühler, N’Goran EK, Gombert J-E, Lemasson A, 2009c. The alarm call system of female Campbell’s monkeys. Anim. Behav. 78: 35–44.
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Spector, Benjamin: 2007, Aspects of the pragmatics of plural morphology: On higher-order implicatures. In Uli Sauerland and Penka Stateva (eds.), Presupposition and Implicature in Compositional Semantics, pages 243-281. PalgraveMacmillan, Houndsmills.
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C.N. Templeton, Erick Greene, Kate Davis, 2005. Allometry of alarm calls: black-capped chickadees encode information about predator size. Science 308:1934-1937
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Zuberbühler, Klaus: 2000, Interspecies semantic communication in two forest primates. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Ser B Biol Sci 267:713–718
Zuberbühler, Klaus: 2002,A syntactic rule in forest monkey communication. Animal Behaviour 63 (2), 293-299
Zuberbühler, K.: 2003, Referential signalling in non-human primates: cognitive precursors and limitations for the evolution of language. Advances in the Study of Behavior, 33, 265–307
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Monkeys
Mona monkeys (C. mona, cousins of Campbell's monkeys)
Apes
Gibbon interacting with tigers
Bonobo food calls [go to Audio S1 - Audio S2]
'Signing' Apes
Bonobos using lexigrams
'Kanzi, an Ape of Genius' (NHK)
Kanzi on Anderson Cooper's 360
Orangutan Chantek:
TED talk by Chantek's cross-foster mom
Beyond Primates
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