baboons ability seems language-like - devil in the like

[Patrick, Peter L]

It seems to me that what is going on with the baboons is still not (very) linguistic, and involves not sentences but rather adjacency pairs. Though familiar from CA, these need not necessarily involve language - lots of interactional things we do could be classified as adjacency pairs w/o having speech occur. 

It's true that these particular pairs seem to involve a rudimentary form of utterance, as the authors note, and that is interesting - but that is still not the same as having syntax/being a sentence. The mistake seems to be leaping from one to the other (watch out for that tree!)...

You can string together as many holophrastic utterances as you like and yet not have syntax. Of course, the authors don't claim that they've found language, but rather that they've got something a lilttle bit like it - and that seems to me correct. The only problem is that it's hard enough to infer what human speakers are doing in parsing sentences we can analyse, much less what baboon callers are doing in parsing sequences of utterances that clearly cannot be analysed...

	-plp-

Prof. Peter L. Patrick
Dept. of Language and Linguistics
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester CO4 3SQ, U.K.
patrickp at essex.ac.uk
(+44) 1206  872088
http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~patrickp


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-linganth at ats.rochester.edu [mailto:owner-linganth at ats.rochester.edu] On Behalf Of Kerim Friedman
Sent: 14 October 2007 11:57
To: linganth at cc.rochester.edu
Subject: Re: [Linganth] baboons¹ ability seems language-like

I found the paper that the NY times statement seems to be referring to.

Seyfarth, R.M., Cheney, D.L. & Bergman, T.J. 2005. Primate social
cognition and the origins of language. Trends in Cognitive Science 9,
264-266.

http://www.psych.upenn.edu/%7Eseyfarth/Publications/tics.pdf

It confirms my reading that they were referring to the ways in which
the listener parses the social relations while listening to the
utterances rather than the nature of the utterances themselves.

Here is what they say in the conclusion:

"Of course, this call sequence differs strikingly from a sentence
because it was produced by two individuals, each of whom was using a
single call type that is predictably linked to a narrowly defined
social situation. Taken alone, neither animal's calls could even
remotely be described as linguistic. Together, however, the two
animals produce a sequence that is interpreted by listeners in a
manner that resembles the way we interpret sentences, both in the
information acquired and in the manner of its construction. Baboons
acquire propositional information by combining their knowledge of call
types, callers, and the callers' places in a social network, and by
assuming a causal relation between one animal's vocalizations and
another's.

The sound sequence created by the combination of Sylvia's
threat-grunts and Hannah's screams is also striking because, from the
listener 's perspective, it represents a concatenation of two
vocalizations, each meaningful on its own, into a larger meaningful
utterance. In principle, a very large number of such combinations is
possible, limited only by the size of the group. Among non-human
species, such call combinations are rarely produced by a single
individual; however, listeners in group-living primates confront them
whenever they hear two animals vocalizing to one another. "

- kerim