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Monkey Semantics
(LINGUAE, Institut Jean-Nicod, CNRS; New York University)
Université Libre de Bruxelles, February 7, 2015 - 6 hours
Instructor: Philippe Schlenker
Directeur de Recherche, Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris
Global Distinguished Professor, New York University
Euryi Project Leader, ESF; Advanced Grant Leader, ERC
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 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.
Note: the readings and slides are made available in this shared Dropbox folder. Please email the instructor to obtain the link if it has been deactivated.
Introduction. Campbell's monkeys
Readings:
-Zuberbühler 2009
-Schlenker et al. 2014 ('Monkey Semantics')
Optional (Campbell's calls): Ouattara et al. 2009a and Ouattara et al. 2009b: less recent and less formal than Schlenker et al. 2014
Optional (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)
Putty-nosed monkeys
Readings:
Schlenker et al. 2014 ('Pyow-Hack Revisited')
Arnold and Zuberbühler 2012.
Optional: Pappworth et al. 2008
Links:
Examples of Putty-nosed monkey calls [Nature]
Titi monkeys
Readings on Titi monkeys: Cäsar et al. 2013
Readings on Apes: Hobaiter and Byrne 2011
Optional: 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.
Links:
General presentation of long-range calls in other Titi monkeys
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.
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Dyer, Fred D.: 2002, The Biology of the Dance Language. Annu. Rev. Entomol. 2002. 47:917–49
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Gautier-Hion, Annie, Colyn, Annie and Gautier, Jean-Pierre : Histoire naturelle des primates d'Afrique Centrale, ECOFAC, 1999 [pdf]
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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.
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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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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
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More monkeys
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
Example of a Colobus monkey (Guereza) morning chorus
Black-and-White Colobus monkeys (Polykomos) in the wild
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
Beyond Primates
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