The Meaning of Primate Signals
The Meaning of Primate Signals
£30.99
GBPLanguage is just one particularly highly developed form of primate communication. Recent years have seen increased attention to other forms: studies of animals in the wild, efforts to teach sign language to apes. This volume reflects perspectives from a variety of disciplines on the nature and function of primate signalling systems. Monkeys and apes, like people, live in a world in which they are constantly receiving and transmitting information. How can we interpret the ways in which they process it without imposing our own language-based categorizations? The problem is partly scientific, partly conceptual: that is, partly concerned with what language is. The authors' findings and insights will be of interest to a broad group of primatologists, linguists, psychologists, anthropologists and philosophers.
Product details
December 2008Paperback
9780521087735
272 pages
213 × 152 × 16 mm
0.4kg
Available
Table of Contents
- Part I. The Setting of the Problem:
- 1 Devious intentions of monkeys and apes? Duane Quiatt
- 2. What the vocalizations of monkeys mean to humans and what they mean to monkeys themselves Robert M. Seyfarth
- 3. Category formation in vervet monkeys Dorothy L. Cheney
- Part II. Theoretical Preliminaries:
- 4. The strange creature Justin Leiber
- 5. Vocabularies and theories Rom Harre
- 6. Ethology and language Edwin Ardener
- 7. Must monkeys mean? Roy Harris
- 8. The inevitability and utility of anthopomorphism in description of primate behaviour Pamela J. Asquith
- Part III. Steps towards a solution:
- 9. 'Language' in apes H. S. Terrace
- 10. Social changes in a group of rhesus monkeys Vernon Reynolds
- 11. Categorization of social signals as derived from quantitative analyses of communication processes M. Maurus and D. Ploog
- 12. Experience tells Eric Jones and Michael Chance.
