Discourse and gibbons

[Ronald Kephart]

on 11/14/02 9:19 AM, Celso Alvarez Caccamo wrote:

> Well, I didn't have a "definition" of discourse -- I commented on Ron's
> support of Crystal's definition...
>
Hi Celso,

(I put the subject header back in to keep the thread "visible".)

Actually, I wasn't offering support for Crystal's definition so much as
tossing out one possible notion of "discourse" that seemed to apply, loosely
I admit, to the topic at hand. I (like you, perhaps?) don't care much for
definitions; I prefer to let a term float out there, available when needed.
I'm reminded of De Waal's book *Chimpanzee Politics*; do (can?) chimps
really have "politics"?  Maybe, maybe not by some definitions, but at least
I understood immediately what he meant. I guess I feel the same way about
"gibbon discourse."

> So, if primates (as far as I know) don't possess reflexivity, metalanguage,
> displacement, or prevarication (deceiving is not the same, and it's not
> linguistic; see below)...
>
Right. Mother birds can practice "deception" by pretending to be wounded and
flopping around on the ground to lure a predator away from their nest. Which
may not be very different from the vervet monkeys who learn to sound an
alarm call when they're about to get beat up by an older monkey (normally,
vervet alarm calls are specific for type of danger involved and elicit
avoidance behavior appropriate to the particular danger).

On the other hand... I recall (but have no reference for) a story about
Koko, the gorilla who has acquired *some* use of ASL. One day her trainer,
Penny Patterson, entered Koko's trailer and discovered a large pile of
Koko-caca on the floor. She asked Koko (signing) "who did this?"  Koko
signed back "*You* did it." And then, there are the chimps who, when asked
to choose which pile of m&m's to give to another chimp, always chose the
large pile even tho it went to the other chimp while they were let with the
small pile. However, when they learned numbers and then were asked whether
to give away the pile with 3 or the pile with 5 m&m's, they could choose the
smaller pile to give away and keep the bigger one for themselves.

It seems to me that some of our fellow hominoids may have more going for
them cognitively than even they are able to know; almost as if they have
some form of computational system, but not the symbols (numbers, words) to
plug into it so they can make use of it. But that's just a *really* wild
speculation...

> the "discourse" they may build with their language is so far removed from
> human discourse that I don't see the point in calling it discourse.  (It's
> just like calling the entire universe a "text": it's poetic, but doesn't say
> what is its nature).
>

Here I disagree. Gibbons, chimps, bonobos, orangs, and gorillas are *much*
more like us than we are like the entire universe. So close that, to me, as
an anthropologist, it makes perfect sense to include an understanding of
them in an understanding of what it means to be human.

(Disclosure statement: I sometimes spend hours at the local zoo watching our
Bonobo family: mom, dad, and two preadolescent kids. They're some of my
favorite people.)

--
Ronald Kephart
English & Foreign Languages
University of North Florida
http://www.unf.edu/~rkephart/