know best,birds and monkeys.The first question is what do animal
sounds mean? are they just displays of emotion,or is there more? do
some animal calls serve as symbols? Second,I will grapple with just one
aspect of the central linguistic theme of syntax.Adopting once more a
reductionistic approach,I ask,do animals speak in sentences? Third,I
offer some elementary speculations about a possible animal antecedent
to that other distinctively human achievement,making music.Do
animals create music?What Do Animal Sounds Mean?Some fifteen years or so ago,the thinking of zoologists about the seman-
tics of calls of animals,especially the vocalizations of monkeys and apes,
underwent something of a revolution.Not long ago,speculations about
how best to interpret animal calls were all based on what Donald Griffin
(1992) aptly described as the “groans of pain”(GOP) concept of animal
communication.This approach assumes that vocalizations of monkeys
and other animals are displays of emotion or affect,much like our own
facial expressions.Only humans are thought to have progressed beyond
this condition and to have achieved symbolic signaling.Premack (1975)
stated the prevailing view clearly and succinctly:“Man has both affec-
tive and symbolic communication.All other species,except when tutored
by man,have only the affective form.”Symbolic signals are taken to be
those that have identifiable referents that the signal can be said to
connote in an abstract,noniconic fashion.For an animal communication
system to qualify as symbolic,information about one or more referents
has to be both encoded noniconically by signalers and decoded in equiv-
alent form by receivers.
Note that this is not a discussion about whether animal signals are
meaningful or meaningless.Both affective and symbolic animal signals
are meaningful and are often rich in information content;both serve
important and diverse functions,some communicative to other individ-
uals,some with repercussions for the physiological and mental states of
the signaler.At issue here is not the presence of meaning but the kind
of meaning that affective and symbolic signals convey.This is a complex
subject with many dimensions.Some view the contrasts as differences in
degree rather than kind.In some circumstances signals traditionally
thought of as affective,such as human facial expressions,can assume a
symbolic function.Complex signals may contain within them intimately
blended components in which the balance between affective and sym-
bolic content can vary dramatically from one to another.Speech is an
obvious case.Anonymous computerized speech,lacking individual iden-32 Peter MarlerMUS3 9/14/99 11:58 AM Page 32