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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."
FP!
THL phish sticks
But when they throw "exceptions", look out!
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
There are so many people out there who have been pushing for "animals can speak!" and "we taught monkeys to use sign language!" And it's like, as a linguist, one has to pull out all sorts of jargon and details about why this isn't actual language.
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.
That's why I think this is so cool... a chance to really look at a real proto-syntax, because all human languages have a very strongly developed syntax.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
The monkey version of "Timber!" is “Boom boom krak-oo krak-oo krak-oo". So, in monkey it's 8 sylables, and in English it's 2. No wonder humans became the dominant species, we had more time to get out of the way after the falling tree warning.
Haha, they said PNAS.
The monkeys' lawyers just served papers on the researchers for copyright violations and the making of unauthorized reproductions of the primates' intellectual property. Spokesape Lance Link said "The researchers have submitted my clients' calls to several funding agencies. This is clearly intent to distribute my clients' intellectual properties, and we will therefore be seeking compensatory and punitive damages of one billion bananas for each call infringed upon."
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Violate Strunk and White just once and they'll fling shit at you.
Have gnu, will travel.
The researchers plan to play back recordings to the monkeys to test their theories for syntax errors.
Create a very long string of recordings of unrelated calls and play them back to check for buffer overflow errors...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
I'm sure there'll be a lot of enlightening commentary about this pretty soon, but my first reaction to it is that the example cited by TFA is not clearly syntactic, in the strictest linguistic sense. Look, for example, at this quote:
So, the meaning we are told for "krak-oo" is not a clear function of the meanings of "krak" and "-oo." The second paragraph makes an even more problematic claim: "boom" and "krak-oo," combined together, means something completely different than the parts.
What's the problem with this? That one of the paradigmatic properties of syntactic constructions in human language is compositionality, the principle that the meaning of an expression made of parts A and B is a function of the meanings of A and B themselves, and of the manner in which they are combined in the expression. So the meaning of Dog bites man is a function of the meanings of the words, and the way in which they are combined (so that it doesn't mean the same thing as Man bites dog).
This doesn't mean that there isn't no non-compositionality in human language, or even in syntax, but rather that compositionality is typical of syntax, and noncompositionality is typical of morphology. There's in fact tons of noncompositionality in human language, but it's hard to argue that monkeys have a semblance of human language unless you can clearly argue that the meanings of the subparts of the complex calls combine compositionally.
Are you adequate?
Okay, okay, you're both linguists. But are you cunning?
Actually, "meaning" isn't just limited to sense and reference (semantics).
Meaning, that is, syntactic meaning, is a key component of syntax. Without meaning, syntax can't exist.
Knowing that a repeating pattern has a logical definitional rule behind it is a key element of meaning. If I say the word "mine" to you, without syntax, you have no idea of the semantic meaning. Is it a verb? An object? A noun? If it is a noun, does it refer to the kind for digging or the kind for exploding? Syntax plays a huge role in meaning.
Consider that the monkeys have a semantic inventory of distinct sounds A , B, and C. Semantically, they have three concepts and no more--because they lack syntax. With a simple syntactic structure, the sounds get new meanings because sequence suddenly informs meaning.
Without syntax, words can only have one meaning. As the article argues and as the sentence describes, the fact that position changes the meaning of sounds is key evidence of the use of syntax in the language. If semantic meaning were unaffected by sequence, that would be evidence of the absence of syntax.
Semantics cannot be divorced from phonology and syntax in oral language. Phonological meaning plus syntactic meaning is fundamentally semantic meaning. More advanced languages have more complicated systems of context and idiom that add layers onto this. But the basic point remains that meaning is certainly an element of syntax.
I have an alternative hypothesis to the one presented in the summary. (Haven't RTFA, fwiw).
I propose that the word for "leopard" really is the word for "tree". Why?
Well, suppose the suffix "-oo" means "get up into", and the "come[s] over here" part refers to the trees, not the monkeys.
Observe that getting up in the trees is a good way to avoid leopards, and that when you yell "Timber!", it's because trees are coming your way. That way, what the monkeys say should still produce the same behaviour as with the summary's language, but the words seem to have more stable, consistent meanings.
If this were not the case, one might expect the monkeys to say "leopard + comes-over-here" and "tree + comes-over-here", or something similarly systematic.
Also, observe how (human) children apply simple and logical (but sometimes wrong) rules to construct sentence patterns; something like the thought "hey, the expression "you're going down" must mean that relative to you, I'm going up. Yeah! "I'm going up, you [word]!"". Key point being: simple rules, a consistent inverse relationship between up and down. Wouldn't it make sense that monkeys have a similarly simple and consistent language?
Note also that the monkeys signal different behaviours when they observe or suspect eagles and snakes. The word for "eagle" might really mean "duck and cover", and the word for "snake" might really mean "stand really still, on your toes, and look down", since that is how they handle these different kinds of predators.
It might also be more effective to say "get up in the trees" and "get up in the trees" versus "there's a leopard coming" and "there's a [different non-climber] coming"; that way, you can get away with a smaller vocabulary, a more restricted vocal apparatus (since you don't need many different sounds), etc. Just cheaper overall.
My cents tw-oo ;-)
Monkey see, Monkey dupe?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!