We believe our program to be both intense and diverse. It has been designed with the idea in mind that linguists and biologists should learn from one another, talk together and build a long-lasting research community.
To this end, we will offer fundamental courses on key theoretical and practical issues, co-taught by both linguists and biologists. We will also dedicate one afternoon to 'hands on' data collection at the zoo where volunteers will be able to learn how we collect observational and acoustical data from animals.
Case studies on bird syntax and monkey semantics are expected to bring hands-on examples on how linguistic concepts can be applied to animal communication systems. Our course on animal and human concepts will also help understand and discuss the legitimacy of applying linguistic concepts to animal communication.
Since formal approaches in linguistics have also been applied to non-vocal systems (such as music, signs and dance), we will explore the application of linguistics's tools to non-vocal communication systems in animals, specifically gestures and dance.
Communication systems are dynamic and a number of tentatives have sought to reconstruct the history of human languages. Thanks to recent developments in machine learning, it has now become possible to simulate the likely history of communication systems which are million years old. The class on evolutionary animal linguistics will introduce us with those approaches.
Finally, guest lectures by leaders in the field of animal communication will bring discussions on how to best move forward.
In human languages, complex information is communicated by combining meaningful parts (semantics) into structures (syntax), which recipients interpret against the background context (pragmatics). Animal communication systems have sometimes been described in a similar way. In this series of three classes, each taught by a linguist-biologist team, we (i) introduce the concepts, methodologies and explanatory aims of semantics, syntax and pragmatics and (ii) discuss their application in the study of animal communication.
A robust study of animal linguistics requires two strong components: a relevant linguistic analysis applied to a valid dataset. If the dataset is not collected following strict and well-thought guidelines, using proper equipment, and avoiding traditional pitfalls, the basis of the work can not be considered as valid: subsequent analyses are then of no use.
During the theoretical course, we will introduce the basic methods of ethology that are commonly used to collect data on animal gestures and vocalizations. We will cover all the steps of an ethological study, by discussing how to ask the question and establish the predictions, how to choose the model species and the population, which the traditional observational and experimental methods are, which equipment should be used, and how to deal with pitfalls such as observer bias, anthropomorphism and pseudo replication. Finally, we will talk about the ethics of data collection and of the study of animal behaviour in general.
The second part of the day will be a practical course at the local zoo, where attendees will have the opportunity to develop and run a small research project on the species of their choice. The entrance ticket price is covered by the Teaching Exchange.
In language, words often convey independent meanings and syntax allows combining multiple words into more complex, compositional expressions. In contrast, animal communication signals have long been considered as motivational: vocalizations merely reflect emotion or arousal of signalers and do not provide compositional messages even when multiple units are combined. However, recent field studies have challenged this assumption by showing that several species of birds and nonhuman primates may be able not only to assign independent meanings to acoustically discrete vocalizations, but also to combine these signals into higher lexical sequences. In this talk, I review recent advances in the studies of avian vocal communication and discuss how these contributions may help to uncover the origins and evolution of key building blocks of human language, such as referentiality and compositionality.
We will summarize initial results of an emerging field of 'primate semantics', which combines results from primatology with general tools from linguistics to offer a detailed analysis of the meaning of primate calls. Across several case studies (pertaining to Campbell's monkeys, Titi monkeys and Putty-nosed monkeys), a unifying question is that of the division of labor between literal meaning, pragmatic enrichment, and the environmental context.
In the last decades, ethologists have deployed considerable efforts to document the conditions of use of various calls, one species after another, using both observational and experimental methods. Based on this effort, it is now possible to study the evolution of animals languages using phylogenetic methods. We will present classical methods and results of human languages phylogenetics, how it can be applied to animals languages, and what we could learn from them.
Across human languages, words are "connected": a noun refers to *similar* objects, a colour adjective delimitates a *coherent* region in the colour spectrum, etc. With such connected words, we can categorize the world around us into useful natural classes. We define this connectedness constraint more precisely and more abstractly. Doing so allows us to find consequences of the constraint beyond "content" words: in function words ("every", "few", etc.) and in our reasoning abilities more generally. We will trace the source of this constraint in other animals such as baboons (Papio papio).
Goal: illustrate how the convergence of formal and experimental methods can help study a property first found in human languages, but whose source lies much deeper in human and animal cognition.
The first class on gestures will provide a broad introduction on the topic, whilst the second class will zone in on the syntax and semantics of gestures
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Great Ape Gesture
Language appears to be the most complex system of animal communication described to date. However, its precursors were present in the communication of our evolutionary ancestors and are likely shared by our modern ape cousins. All great apes, including humans, employ a rich repertoire of vocalizations, facial expressions, and gestures. Great ape gestural repertoires are particularly elaborate, with ape species employing over 80 different gesture types intentionally: that is towards a recipient with a specific goal in mind. Intentional usage allows us to ask not only what information is encoded in ape gestures, but what do apes mean when they use them. I will discuss our recent research on ape gesture, including work on human infants. I will also explore how we can define signals and meaning from the perspective of the ape signallers using them. By employing an ape-centric approach we may be better able to describe their communicative capacities.
Gesture as a window onto the mind? Exploring Pragmatics, Syntax, and Reference in non-human communication.
A consistent problem in decoding the communication of others is that we have no direct access to thought. Instead we make a series of inferences based on behaviour and context. When studying the communication of other species this becomes particularly challenging, but with sufficient data, over time, we can find consistent patterns that allow us to predict behaviour and infer cognitive states. Our research group has used this method to explore meaning in the communication of great apes, but how far can we take it? I will explore the flexibility present in the meanings of great ape gestures and ask whether, with current methods, we can explore meaning from a more nuanced perspective, including the combination of different sources of information.
This lecture will overview fundamental linguistic properties of sign and gesture in humans. Several comparisons will be made: we will observe what properties are unique to the visual/gestural modality, thus distinguishing sign language and gesture from spoken language and vocalizations. We will also compare sign language and gesture to see where the two draw on the same resources and where they diverge. We will discuss the organization of the sign language grammar (and comparison to gesture) on multiple levels, from phonological to semantic. Throughout the lecture, we will highlight a number of phenomena that seem to have their roots in pre-linguistic cognition.
This introductory course investigates the application of formal linguistic methodology to dance. Super linguistic approaches to dance have focused on both its syntax and its semantics; current investigations address what a possible grammar (syntax) of dance could look like, and how dance movements are semantically interpreted. Since linguistic theory has long linked the syntax and the semantics of language, linguistic methods emerge as an appropriate tool to investigate how structure can give rise to structure semantic mental representations.
Dance semantics explores the ability of body movement to evoke, denote, or represent certain (often fictitious or abstract) situations; like music semantics, it appears to be based on rules that differ from those of traditional compositional semantics, which analyzes natural language. Moreover, as dance is often performed to music, the analysis of the dance-music interface may well shed insights on music semantics itself, especially by investigating clear cases of dance-music interactions, where musical events and dance events inform one another.
A connection to non-human animals is given by dance in female gibbons, which have recently been observed to dance in the absence of music, and cockatoos, which exhibit behaviors of spontaneous dance on human music. A comparison between dance in humans and dance in other species might illuminate general semantic rules for music, as we may take, for instance, cockatoos’ dance movements to be a good marker of their cognition of music.
The core topics we will cover in this course are:
(i) parameters of dance in humans
(ii) the semantics of narrative dance
(iii) semantics of the dance-music interface
(iv) approaching dance in non-human species: cockatoos and gibbons (ongoing investigations)
Studies of the communicative abilities of animals are often framed within an anthropocentric research program: We begin by identifying specific traits of interest in humans and then check whether these traits, or ‘proto’-versions thereof may be found in other animals. Evolutionary research programs, in contrast, tend to focus on the function of traits, and use bottom-up comparative approaches to reconstruct the evolution of a given trait. Using the case of the alarm call system of members of the genus Chlorocebus (vervet monkeys and green monkeys), I will exemplify the strengths and weaknesses of the respective approaches. I will focus on two aspects of the vervet monkey alarm call system that have been deemed central in the quest to understand the evolution of speech, namely ‘meaning’ and ‘vocal learning’. Our study on green monkey vocal responses to an unknown flying object (a research drone) and the subsequent comparison of the acoustic structure of the alarm calls in the genus provides strong support for the notion that the calls are innate responses to different types of predators. Vocal responses may then be subject to learning by experience, resulting in variation in call usage. Listeners, in contrast, can and need to learn what different sounds refer to, and they are able to do so after minimal exposure. The similarities in the vocal communication of (these) nonhuman primates and humans appear to be on the side of the listener. Concluding with some cautionary remarks on comparative analyses I will argue that there is a greater need to be aware of perhaps unintended consequences of favouring one research approach over the other.
Syntax has been found in animal communication but only humans appear to have generative, hierarchically structured syntax. How did syntax evolve? I discuss three theories of evolutionary transition from animal to human syntax: computational capacity, structural flexibility and event perception. The computation hypothesis is supported by artificial grammar experiments consistently showing that only humans can learn linear stimulus sequences with an underlying hierarchical structure, a possible by-product of computationally powerful large brains. The structural flexibility hypothesis is supported by evidence of meaning-bearing combinatorial and permutational signal sequences in animals, with sometimes compositional features, but no evidence for generativity or hierarchical structure. Again, animals may be constrained by computational limits in short-term memory but possibly also by limits in articulatory control and social cognition. The event categorization hypothesis, finally, posits that humans are cognitively predisposed to analyse natural events by assigning agency and assessing how agents impact on patients, a propensity that is reflected by the basic syntactic units in all languages. Whether animals perceive natural events in the same way is largely unknown, although event perception may provide the cognitive grounding for syntax evolution.