Monkey Semantics

Based on collaborative work with Kate Arnold, Alban Lemasson, Karim Ouattara, Sumir Keenan, Claudia Stephan, Robin Ryder, Klaus Zuberbühler.

In the last 30 years, field experiments in primatology have yielded rich data on the morphology, syntax and semantics of primate alarm calls. A recent and particularly rich example is afforded by the alarm calls of male Campbell's monkeys: Ouattara et al. 2009a, b suggested that these calls (i) include 4 roots (krak, hok, wak, boom), (ii) one suffix (-oo) which attaches to 3 of the roots (yielding krak-oo, hok-oo, wak-oo), and (iii) possibly one clear syntactic rule (boom appears sentence-initially). We will argue that such data can be illuminated by the general tools of formal semantics and pragmatics. Using Campbell's calls as a case study, we will sketch two possible analyses to handle rich data collected on two separate sites – with surprising cases of apparent dialectal variation.
(We will stress that at this point our enterprise does not entail any claim about the similarity or evolutionary connection between monkey communication and human language.)  

Full paper available on LingBuzz