Introducing Linguistics Theoretical and Applied Approaches

Chapter 16 focuses on the ability for certain members of the animal kingdom to communicate. It first compares the notions of communication and language and examines the ways in which animals may signal information through visual, auditory, chemosensory, mechanoreceptive, and electromagnetic channels. It explains the type of information conveyed by animal communication including alarm, food, mating, and aggressive signals. The chapter then lists the properties that researchers have considered basic to all human languages, including not only arbitrariness of symbols, discreteness, displacement, semantics, productivity, and duality, but also grammar and recursion. The chapter then shows that many of these well-known properties are also found at least in some members of the animal kingdom, namely in the signals of prairie dogs and honeybees.