baboons ¹ ability seems language-like

[Janina Fenigsen]

Do you think it would make sense to suggest that --to the extent the
empirical findings are solid-- those baboons seem to have the pragmatics
of communication but not language in the sense we do. BTW, I've long
felt that perhaps the most distinctive aspect of human language is
its/our metalinguistic ability. Intuitively, one can imagine that a
baboon's call may stand for, say, "snake, run!" It is much harder to
imagine another elderly baboon hard on the hearing and witnessing the
communication, utter:"what did he say?"

janina fenigsen

>>> "Kerim Friedman" <oxusnet at gmail.com> 10/14/07 6:56 AM >>>
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