Keywords In and Out of Context

There is so much going on with animal communication research, particularly in relation to the evolution of human language (far more than the brief account that I provided in Chapter 2), that I thought I’d start this post with a link to Berthet and colleagues’ 2023 primer on “Animal Linguistics” in Biological Reviews, which provides an excellent overview intended for the use of both biologists and linguists interested in this topic but accessible to the non-specialist as well.

On the broader topic of how to do things with non-words, I’m also linking to Dorit Bar-On’s 2021 paper of that title. Bar-On is a philosopher of language, so her references include such philosophical thinkers as Carnap, Grice, and Millikan (as well as Austin, though she clearly expects us to be able to make that particular connection without a prompting reference.)

Bar-On writes, “Instead of looking from the start for the origins of human language–understood as a syntactically and semantically combinatorial, recursive system of discrete symbolic elements–we should begin by looking for the origins of human linguistic communication. This shift in focus is thought to allow us to recognize certain continuities in use between what humans do with words and what nonhuman animals do with their communicative signals (‘nonwords’). Such continuities may exist alongside the admittedly deep syntactic and semantic differences between human languages and animal communication systems. Hence ‘pragmatics first’.”

Bar-On’s own proposal to study the evolution of human communication is to de-emphasize the current fixation on “theory of mind” in primate communication study in favor of Tomassello’s empirical approach to the study of great ape vocalizations and gestural communication, in which he argues that “the communicator has some action he wants from the recipient … and to attain this he attempts to draw the recipient’s attention to something… [This] indirectness [represents a] genuine evolutionary novelty–almost certainly confined to great apes and perhaps other primates–and may be considered the closest thing we have to a ‘missing link’ between nonhuman primate communication and … human referential [ostensive-inferential] communication.”

More broadly, Bar-On suggests what she calls a “genuinely intermediary pragmatics-first approach… [by] looking beyond the Carnapian narrow context-dependence of the informational content of animals’ communicative signals.. . In keeping with the Gricean insight concerning communication ‘from a psychological point of view’, this requires investigating the extent to which the relevant forms of communication exploit a capacity for mind-dependent
context-dependent uses of signals. Such uses would resemble and potentially foreshadow what Millikan describes as ‘improvisational’ uses of non-symbolic linguistic devices. An intermediary pragmatics-first investigation could help shed
light on the emergence of linguistic communication by bringing into view a way of reconceiving the puzzle of the evolution of language. In approaching the puzzle, we should not be asking, in the first place: How could meta-representational ostensive-inferential communication have emerged from merely coded animal communication? We should instead be asking: How could animals’ psychological capacity for non-Gricean recognition of each other’s states of mind come to be harnessed so as to enable psychologically mediated uses of communicative signals?”

Two recent non-philosophical articles may relate to her question as well. Webster & Rutz’s 2020 piece in Nature asks “How STRANGE are your study animals?“, riffing on the growing realization among researchers in the human sciences since the publication of Henrich’s 2010 landmark paper that much of our past research on human beings has been implicitly WEIRD (that is, biased towards the selection of participants from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies rather than toward a more comprehensive human population sample which might well give different results.) Webster & Rutz argue that animal researchers need to be aware of the fact that non-human animals even of the same species may vary dramatically and that any sampling strategy needs to take this into account.

Their STRANGE framework provides critical questions to ask concerning each animal’s Social background, Trappability and self-selection, Rearing history, Acclimatization and habituation, Natural changes in responsiveness, Genetic make-up, and Experience, all of which may factor into the research results, either explicitly if the researcher is aware of the potential for bias or implicitly if the researcher ignores these elements.

A second piece that caught my eye makes a different but equally important critique: Prat’s 2019 article in Perspectives in Psychological Science, titled “Animals Have No Language, and Humans Are Animals Too” , which makes the case that there have been no adequate cross-species comparisons unbiased by the natural human tendency to adopt the “human” perspective on communication. Prat recommends the application of new balanced and unbiased comparative methods in studying vocal behavior of different species, which “could result in sound and convincing findings regarding the shared and unshared components of this behavior. Until we do this type of research, we are compelled to conclude that compared with humans, vervet monkeys have more sophisticated semantics, songbirds have richer syntax, and elephants and fruit bats are better vocal learners” (page 891).

I should observe here that library & information science researchers have tended to ignore both research in animal communication (with a few exceptions such as this recent paper in Library & Information Science Research) and research in pragmatics (with the always notable exception of Birger Hjørland, who commented in a 2018 Knowledge Organization article (page 324) that “Broadly speaking, one can find two conflicting views on the role of pragmatics in the study of language. On the one hand, in mainstream contemporary linguistics (dominated by the Chomskian school), syntax is viewed as the primary study object of linguistics; semantics is added when grammar is not enough; and pragmatics is what is left over (context, deixis, etc.). On the other hand, a second tradition turns the study programme upside-down: actions are seen as the most basic entities; pragmatics consists of the rules for linguistic actions; semantics is conventionalised pragmatics; and finally, syntax adds grammatical markers to help disambiguate when the context does not suffice to do so. This tradition connects with several other research areas like anthropology, psychology, and situated cognition. The shift from a cognitive, individual perspective to a social and cultural perspective is important for LIS.”)

As an aside, I would suggest that this transition still hasn’t fully occurred in LIS, especially the largely unexplored relevance of relevance theory to much of our information-seeking behavior, which encompasses keywords, words of all kinds, and, surprisingly often, non-words.