Monkeys With Syntax

jamie writes "The Campbell's monkey has a vocabulary with at least six types of basic call, but new research published in the PNAS claims that they combine them and string them together to communicate new meanings. (Login may be required on the NY Times site.) For example, the word for 'leopard' gets an '-oo' suffix to mean 'unseen predator.' But when that word is repeated after 'come over here,' the combination means 'Timber!' — a warning of falling trees. Scientists have known for some time that vervet monkeys have different warning calls for different predators — eagle, leopard, and snake — but unlike the Campbell's monkeys, vervets don't combine those calls to create new meanings, a key component of syntax. The researchers plan to play back recordings to the monkeys to test their theories for syntax errors."

Comments

Re:This is what linguists have been waiting for

[Internalist]

Those scientists who have been studying animal language as a non-pseudoscience have been waiting for anyone to show SYNTAX in animal language. You have have 1 trillion different words in a language, and it has a finite range of expressions... meanwhile you can have 10 different words, that with the right syntax can generate an infinite range of expressions.

While this is true, it's not clear to me that what's documented here is, in fact, syntax. The researcher in question (Zuberbühler) has written about this stuff before and has been much more cautious in attributing full-on linguistic properties (a search of LanguageLog will turn something up from 2006).

I'll reserve absolute judgment for when I get a chance to look at the actual paper, but this quote from NYT gives me pause: Two booms can be combined with a series of "krak-oos," with a meaning entirely different to that of either of its components. This is not (typically) how human language works...meaning is compositionally built up from bits of syntax, whereas what's described here looks more like idiom. In fact, it looks more like phonology (*maybe* morphology) to me...meaningless bits that can be put together to make meaningful bits.

What they need to do now is get a linguist in there so slice & dice the recordings, play them back to the monkeys in various reconstructed forms, and see how they react.

Also...

[...] a chance to really look at a real proto-syntax, because all human languages have a very strongly developed syntax

some would argue against the subordinate clause here (pointing at Piraha, for example), but I'm not one of those. However, it might be the case that this "syntax" has developed in parallel to human syntax from some common protolanguage (since these are monkeys and not even apes, we're talking REALLY far back), and so this may be relatively uninformative with respect to human syntax.