New Books in Language cover image

Philippe Schlenker, "What It All Means: Semantics for (Almost) Everything" (MIT Press, 2022)

New Books in Language

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Do Primates Have Languages?

Some animal communication systems which I call animal languages are simple enough that we can have the beginning of complete hypotheses about them. And so pedagogically, it's a very good way to get into the idea of having explicit and predictive models of any communication system. So for instance we collaborated with a primatologist what worked on Campbell's monkeys, and had found something which is plausibly a case of a little suffix. The suffix ooh in campus monkeys and it can be added to two separate calls. Analyzing the suffix ooh is really fascinating. Does it work like a suffix in human language I mean, you know, probably not really. Now it's an open question whether there might

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