Animal versus Human Language

[Steve Long]

In a message dated 12/4/02 1:07:13 PM, li at GRADDIV.UCSB.EDU writes:
<<What they have is 'function' such as threat, distress, begging,
appeasement/submission, courtship/copulation, warning/alarm, recruitment,
assembly, dispersion, identification, territoriality, feeding, etc. Functions
must not be confused with 'meaning".  Each of the following linguistic
expressions has the function of 'threat':
         I'm going to bite your ears.
         I'll kill you.
         I'll knock you over.
         I'm going to beat you up.
But they all have different meanings, and they have different meanings
because they are linguistic expressions. >>

I'm sorry to say that this differentiation seems completely artificial.

Each of those "meanings" has a different function.  What you are doing here
is making function mean something broad ("threat") and then saying that what
is just a more specific function becomes "meaning".

Obviously I would have a different intent in saying "I'll knock you over"
versus "I'm going to beat you up" (or otherwise the difference is
irrelevant.)  If I intend a different meaning or the listener perceives I'm
promising a different outcome, then the two statements have different
functions.  The terminology here seems to be the only thing that makes the
difference between meaning and function.

What you are demonstrating is a quantitative difference between the level of
discrimination that is available in animal "language", not that it is
qualitatively different.

li at GRADDIV.UCSB.EDU also writes:
<<There are several unbridgeable and distinct boundaries between animal
communicative behavior and the evolutionary development of hominid
communicative behavior leading toward language. The first one is the
emergence of symbolic signals. At the most elemental cognitive level, a
symbolic signal must possess two properties:
(a)     It refers to a concrete object
(b)     The reference is context-independent>>

How exactly does one determine that an animal communication is not a
reference to a concrete object?  And when ever -- even in the most abstract
human speech -- is a reference "context-independent."

li at GRADDIV.UCSB.EDU also writes:
<<(Many other animals have different warning calls for different approaching
predators. Suricates, a burrowing viverrid related to the mongoose is a good
example.) These warning calls are not symbolic signals because they do not
possess property (b). Nevertheless, the warning calls of the vervet monkeys
represent a step toward a symbolic signal, because they differentiate, for
example, reptilian, avian, mammalian and other predators. The
differentiation, however, holds only in the context of
warning. It is not context-free.>>

This is clearly incorrect in terms of the listener.  The predator is not
present for the listener or the communication is functionless.  So, for the
vervet monkey being warned, when there is no predator present, the sound is
a) a reference to a concrete object and b) independent of the presence of
that object.  That is a symbol.  And the information that it carries has
consequences and therefore meaning in any human sense.  Since we cannot read
a vervet monkey's mind, that is the best we can say about the situation.

li at GRADDIV.UCSB.EDU also writes:
<<The learning during ontological development involves the correct coupling
of one involuntary vocalization with one specific dangerous situation. Each
vocalization can be graded according to intensity. But it is only the
coupling process that is mediated by the
neocortex, and this coupling process, according to Seyfarth & Cheney,
requires learning. The neural mechanism we have just sketched for non-human
primate communication contrasts sharply with the neural mechanism of the
production of causal, spoken language. The production of casual, spoken
language is primarily, though not exclusively, mediated by the neocortex. The
emotional/motivational state of the speaker can be viewed as a coterminous
but neurologically separate dimension of speech expressed
primarily in prosody.>>

The real question is what animals use the neocortex for and whether their
"communications" can be made to be mediated by the neocortex.  Many
domesticated animals, birds and primates can all be taught to vocalize or
gesture in new ways with new "meanings" -- new functions in new contexts with
new results.  The limitations are as much dependent on the limited outcomes
they are interested in as the limitations of their ability to vocalize or
gesture or even their patience. (Cats, particularly cats, lack "emotional"
patience.)

Functionalism says that outcome (intended or actual) should be the defining
factor.  When you manipulate the outcome or create new effects for
communicative behavior, and the animal learns the causal connection,
communication will occur and go beyond the primal scream and make as much use
of the neocortex as animals make in non-communicative behavior.  And though
I'm reluctant to mention it here, there is a mass of good old Skinnerian
research that amply documents that animal "communicative behavior" can go
beyond functions found in natural settings (threats, warnings, etc.)

li at GRADDIV.UCSB.EDU also writes:
<<It is, therefore, not surprising that participants in casual spoken
conversation can talk about things that are remote in time and space from the
occurrence of the conversation. This is the "displacement" feature of human
language that Charles Hockett (1960) pointed out.>>

All communications to be communications must supply some informational change
in state -- some change in future effect or outcome.  It's not functioning
otherwise.  A threat or a warning implicity deals with the future.  We are
being fooled here by the fact that someone somewhere invented the future
tense in human language.  The fact that the abstraction of time is marked in
human language does not mean it is not at the core of all communication.
Human language embodies a much more complex map of time and space, not a
different one.  Physics works the same way for animals and humans.

As far as place:  I was walking a dog in a nearby field when he yelped and
got some yelps back from the two dogs he lives with.  Soon they joined us
despite their master's assurance that they always "listen" to him and stay
home in those circumstances.  For those two listeners, the conversation was
certainly about a place remote from where they were.

li at GRADDIV.UCSB.EDU also writes:
<<It does not exist in non-human primate communication because a non-human
primate communicative signal tends to be associated with the emotional or
motivational reaction to a particular situation including the animal's own
internal hormonal state.>>

Or perhaps -- to be Freudian about it -- we are just better at channeling our
emotions.  The idea of "emotionless" human communication is akin to what
brocolli would talk like if brocolli could talk.  The level of excitation is
not a qualitative difference.

I'd suggest that Talmy Givons is right about this.  We just can't seem to
shake a non-naturalistic view of human language.  Of course, there is a
difference. As one of the old dialectical philosphers (Hegel or Marx)
observed, the quantitative becomes the qualitative.  Animal language stores
very little information compared to human language.  So it looks as though it
might be doing something different.  But that may be as much the ingenuity in
the design of the software as it is in the basic hardware.

Steve Long