Formal monkey linguistics: The debate

Philippe Schlenker (1, 2) , Emmanuel Chemla (3) , Anne M. Schel (4) , James Fuller (5, 6, 7) , Jean-Pierre Gautier (8) , Jeremy Kuhn (1) , Dunja Veselinović (2) , Kate Arnold (9) , Cristiane Cäsar (10, 11, 9) , Sumir Keenan (9) , Alban Lemasson (8, 12) , Karim Ouattara (13, 8) , Robin Ryder (14) , Klaus Zuberbühler (15)

1 IJN - Institut Jean-Nicod
2 Department of Linguistics
3 LSCP - Laboratoire de sciences cognitives et psycholinguistique
4 Animal Ecology
5 NYCEP - New York Consortium in Evolutionary Primatology
6 Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology
7 CUNY - City University of New York [New York]
8 EthoS - Ethologie animale et humaine
9 School of Psychology & Neuroscience
10 Instituto de Pesquisa Bicho do Mato
11 Departamento de Ciências da Natureza
12 IUF - Institut Universitaire de France
13 COCODY - ZOOLOGIE ET BIOLOGIE ANIMALE - Laboratoire de Zoologie et Biologie animale
14 CEREMADE - CEntre de REcherches en MAthématiques de la DEcision
15 UNINE - Université de Neuchâtel

We explain why general techniques from formal linguistics can and should be applied to the analysis of monkey communication – in the areas of syntax and especially semantics. An informed look at our recent proposals shows that such techniques needn’t rely excessively on categories of human language: syntax and semantics provide versatile formal tools that go beyond the specificities of human linguistics. We argue that “formal monkey linguistics” can yield new insights into monkey morphology, syntax, and semantics, as well as raise provocative new questions about the existence of a pragmatic, competition-based component in these communication systems. Finally, we argue that evolutionary questions, which are highly speculative in human language, can be addressed in an empirically satisfying fashion in primate linguistics, and we lay out problems that should be addressed at the interface between evolutionary primate linguistics and formal analyses of language evolution.

Keywords: primate linguistics; primate semantics; primate syntax; evolutionary primate linguistics; call evolution; evolution of language

Domains: Life Sciences [q-bio]

Philippe Schlenker, Emmanuel Chemla, Anne M. Schel, James Fuller, Jean-Pierre Gautier, et al.. Formal monkey linguistics: The debate. Theoretical Linguistics, 2016, 42 (1-2), ⟨10.1515/tl-2016-0010⟩. ⟨hal-01355433⟩