Ancestral Meanings: A Prelude to Evolutionary Animal Linguistics
Philippe Schlenker, Christina Pawlowitsch, Luc Arnal, Keny Chatain, Lucie Ravaux, Robin Ryder, Ambre Salis, Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, Léo Wang, Emmanuel Chemla
April 2025
 

How did the very first meaning components arise in animals? We argue that answers interact in interesting ways with data on current and ancestral animal communication systems. Using standard notions of evolutionary stability in biology, we develop a simple framework to analyze the emergence of three meaning components: individual signals, non-trivial combinations, and pragmatic principles of competition among signals. We show that for elementary signals to arise, they should have null cost, or be understood from the start. While this conclusion dovetails with the traditional idea that signals often originate in cues, i.e. informative by-products of non-communicative processes, the two scenarios (null cost vs. understanding from the start) can be distinguished in case studies involving ancestral meaning reconstruction. For non-trivial combinations of the form CC' (such as pyow-hack sequences in putty-nosed monkeys and ABC-D sequences in Japanese tits), we show that their emergence is heavily constrained because they should initially give rise to some miscommunication, as CC' could also be understood as the (trivial) combination of separate utterances C and C'. Finally, we investigate the evolution of two pragmatic principles that were posited in recent animal linguistics: the Informativity Principle and the Urgency Principle. We argue that both have a clear evolutionary path, especially if they start appearing in production, and then in comprehension. Overall, recent work in animal linguistics can be fruitfully combined with simple principles of evolutionary stability and with ancestral signal reconstruction to address in a precise fashion questions about the very first meaning operations in nature.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/008203
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: To appear in Linguistics & Philosophy
keywords: evolutionary animal linguistics, evolution of semantics, animal semantics, evolutionary biology, evolutionary game theory, semantics
previous versions: v2 [March 2025]
v1 [June 2024]
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