Discourse and gibbons

[Harold F. Schiffman]

It seems to me that Celso has identified an important issue about primate
communication, and I'm reminded about Hockett's original proposal that
there are 'design features of language' (originally about 8, I think, but
expanded later to 14 or so [I'm doing this from memory, unable to look it
up].) such that some of these features are indeed possessed by bees, or
stickleback fish, or gibbons, but only human language has them all, with
'displacement' being one of the most crucial. (Displacement is the ability
to 'talk' about or refer to an event that happened in another time or in
another space/place.) So perhaps there is a similar list of features of
discourse, some (or all?) of which Celso has identified, but all of which
are only found in human 'discourse' and some of which are found in
different kinds of animal communication (discourse?)

Hal Schiffman


On Wed, 13 Nov 2002, Celso Alvarez [iso-8859-1] Cáccamo wrote:

> I very much agree with Valentina.  As for Ron's :
>
> >Personally, I don't have any special problem thinking about "gibbon
> >discourse," assuming that the evidence suggests that they do in fact
> >exhibit some behavior that fits at least a loose notion of discourse, as
> >e.g. (from Crystal) "a set of utterances which constitute any recognizable
> >speech event..."
>
> I would say even that definition is not applicable to (non-human) primate
> communication. "Utterance", perhaps.  But, "speech event"?  Where's
> planning extended over several turns in primate communication, reflexivity,
> metalanguage, self-corrections, pre-turns, meaning negotiation?  Subject
> position?  Possibility conditions, rules for discourse circulation?
>
> Of course, all this is an empirical issue. But finding all these elements
> is not only a matter of labelling: it is a matter of finding in gibbon
> communication enough internal evidence that communication works in such a
> way that it resembles human communication well enough so that "speech
> event" can be applied without distorting the sense of the expression.
>
> Until this is proven (if), I still prefer "Sex Differences in Gibbon
> Communication" over "The Order of Gibbon Discourse" ;-) .
>
> -celso
> Celso Alvarez Cáccamo
> lxalvarz at udc.es
> http://www.udc.es/dep/lx/cac/
>
>