Defining Language in the Wake of Primate Language Research
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2019
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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en
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Abstract
This text examines language as it is used in the animal language debate through pragmatic and
structural linguistic perspectives on primate language research. The surge of primate language studies in
America in the 1970's generated a wave of public and academic interest in animal language that
continues today in the form of ongoing primate research both in the lab and in the wild. These studies
have forced the field to examine the way it conceptualizes language, as well as the current criteria with
which we use to define it I argue that the traditional linguistic approach to defining language, which
measures language through surface level features, as can be seen in Hockett's design features, cannot
fully describe language, and instead must include a more pragmatic perspective in order to more
accurately measure primate language. Finally I argue that the term language, as it has historically been
used to describe only human language is useless, as its exclusivity ignores the gradient of the
complexity of higher mental faculties across the evolutionary tree.