ArticlePublisher preview available

Referential and General Calls in Primate Semantics

December 2021
Linguistics and Philosophy 44(5)

DOI:10.1007/s10988-021-09322-1

Authors:

Shane Steinert-Threlkeld

Stanford University

Philippe Schlenker

New York University

In recent years, the methods of formal semantics and pragmatics have been fruitfully applied to the analysis of primate communication systems. Most analyses therein appeal to a division of labor between semantics and pragmatics which has the following three features: (F1) calls are given referential meanings (they provide information about the world rather than just about an action to be taken), (F2) some calls have a general meaning, and (F3) the meanings of calls in context are enriched by competition with more informative calls, along the lines of scalar implicatures. In this paper, we develop highly simplified models to independently assess the conditions under which such features would emerge. After identifying a sufficient condition for (F1), we find a range of conditions under which (F2) and (F3) are not evolutionarily stable, and discuss the consequences for both modeling and empirical work.

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Linguistics and Philosophy (2021) 44:1317–1342

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-021-09322-1

ORIGINAL RESEARCH

Referential and general calls in primate semantics

Shane Steinert-Threlkeld1·Philippe Schlenker2,3 ·Emmanuel Chemla4

Accepted: 5 January 2021 / Published online: 15 March 2021

Abstract

In recent years, the methods of formal semantics and pragmatics have been fruitfully

applied to the analysis of primate communication systems. Most analyses therein

appeal to a division of labor between semantics and pragmatics which has the following

three features: (F1) calls are given referential meanings (they provide information

about the world rather than just about an action to be taken), (F2) some calls have a

general meaning, and (F3) the meanings of calls in context are enriched by competition

with more informative calls, along the lines of scalar implicatures. In this paper, we

develop highly simpliﬁed models to independently assess the conditions under which

such features would emerge. After identifying a sufﬁcient condition for (F1), we ﬁnd

a range of conditions under which (F2) and (F3) are not evolutionarily stable, and

discuss the consequences for both modeling and empirical work.

Keywords Primate semantics ·Animal communication ·Informativity reasoning ·

Evolutionary stable strategy

In “Formal Monkey Linguistics” and “What Do Monkey Calls Mean?”, Schlenker

et al. (2016a,c) present three case studies in which they apply methods from formal

linguistics to the analysis of monkey alarm calls.

BShane Steinert-Threlkeld

shanest@uw.edu

Philippe Schlenker

philippe.schlenker@gmail.com

Emmanuel Chemla

chemla@ens.fr

1Department of Linguistics, University of Washington, Seattle, USA

2Institut Jean-Nicod (ENS - EHESS - CNRS), Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL University, Paris,

France

3New York University, New York, USA

4Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Dept d’Etudes Cognitives, ENS, PSL

University, EHESS, CNRS, Paris, France

123

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