LING 15 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Arbitrariness, Kanzi, Time Travel
Document Summary
Animal signals: small in number, limited functions. Mating, fighting, identity, or threat alerts: not decomposable or combinable, very iconic, not as arbitrary as human symbols. Not semantic: no remoteness in time/space/reality, no participant/action. Animal comprehension of human displays: association of human construction with some response, treat human command as call- no attention to internal structure, require conditioning/reward. With anatomy seen in other primates: cognition capable of categorization, lexicalization, and combination (and remoteness, human language. Reference to entities, predication of them: animal communication. Even for other higher primates: holistic/situational calls aren"t abstractions. Evolution out of this would relate the call to the concept rather than to an immediate referent. How can we figure this out: time travel, computational modeling. Allow random addition to comm systems: primate studies. Visual symbols: signs or tokens: ape vocal tracts have little phonetic range, natural calls resemble other animal systems.
