NYU13

Primate Linguistics (and Beyond)

Philippe Schlenker

(LINGUAE, Institut Jean-Nicod, CNRS; New York University)

September-October 2013 - NYU

Instructor: Philippe Schlenker

Directeur de Recherche, Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris

Global Distinguished Professor, New York University

E-mail: philippe.schlenker@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 the seminar is to review recent results on the communication systems of primates and other species, focusing in particular on domains in which the data might be ripe for explicit models using the general tools of formal linguistics. 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.

The seminar will include guest lectures by specialists of animal communication. Students will be encouraged to focus on one non-human species and review what is known about the formal properties of its communication system.

Please email the instructor if you intend to take/attend this seminar.

Requirements

Besides active class participation:

(i) 1 squib/mini-literature review + 1 class presentation

(ii) 1 mini-term paper (to be emailed 10 days after the seminar end)

Recommended topic for (i) and (ii): select a non-human species (whether primate or not); review the literature on its communication system; if possible, propose explicit rules to model it, based on the existing literature (and on raw data if some are available; this might involve contacting the owners of the data).

[Note that there is a lot of interesting work to review which does not pertain to call semantics; non-semantics-related papers are definitely welcome!]

Please contact the instructor as early as possible to discuss (i) and (ii).

Schedule

8 weeks in September-October 2013 (see below). General sessions are open to everybody; student sessions are open to all students and postdocs (whether registered or not).

Sessions and Readings (still tentative; to be adapted as we go)

Note: the readings and slides will be made available by way of a shared Dropbox folder. Please email the instructor to obtain the link.

Note: Robert Seyfarth (UPenn) is scheduled to give a Colloquium talk at the Anthropology Department on November 14, 2013. More information here.

Links

Primate Literature

Ofer Tchernichovski's lab

Klaus Zuberbühler's summary of Primate Communication

James Higham's NYU class on '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.

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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.

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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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