Schlenker Philippe, Salis Ambre, Leroux Maël, Coye Camille, Rizzi Luigi, Steinert-Threlkeld Shane, Chemla Emmanuel
Département d'Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Institut Jean-Nicod (ENS-EHESS-CNRS), PSL University, 29, rue d'Ulm, Paris, 75005, France.
Department of Linguistics, New York University, 10 Washington Place, New York, NY, 10003, USA.
Biol Rev Camb Philos Soc. 2024 Aug;99(4):1278-1297. doi: 10.1111/brv.13068. Epub 2024 Mar 28.
It was argued in a series of experimental studies that Japanese tits (Parus minor) have an ABC call that has an alert function, a D call that has a recruitment function, and an ABC-D call that is compositionally derived from ABC and D, and has a mobbing function. A key conclusion was that ABC-D differs from the combination of separate utterances of ABC and of D (e.g. as played by distinct but close loudspeakers). While the logic of the argument is arguably sound, no explicit rule has been proposed to derive the meaning of ABC-D from that of its parts. We compare two analyses. One posits a limited instance of semantic compositionality ('Minimal Compositionality'); the other does without compositionality, but uses instead a more sophisticated pragmatics ('Bird Implicatures'). Minimal Compositionality takes the composition of ABC and D to deviate only minimally from what would be found with two independent utterances: ABC means that 'there is something that licenses an alert', D means that 'there is something that licenses recruitment', and ABC-D means that 'there is something that licenses both an alert and recruitment'. By contrast, ABC and D as independent utterances yield something weaker, namely: 'there is something that licenses an alert, and there is something that licenses recruitment', without any 'binding' across the two utterances. The second theory, Bird Implicatures, only requires that ABC-D should be more informative than ABC, and/or than D. It builds on the idea, proposed for several monkey species, that a less-informative call competes with a more informative one (the 'Informativity Principle'): when produced alone, ABC and D trigger an inference that ABC-D is false. We explain how both Minimal Compositionality and Bird Implicatures could have evolved, and we compare the predictions of the two theories. Finally, we extend the discussion to some chimpanzee and meerkat sequences that might raise related theoretical problems.
在一系列实验研究中有人认为，日本山雀（Parus minor）有一种具有警报功能的ABC叫声、一种具有召集功能的D叫声，以及一种由ABC和D组合衍生而来且具有驱赶功能的ABC - D叫声。一个关键结论是，ABC - D不同于ABC和D单独发声的组合（例如由不同但相邻的扬声器播放）。虽然该论点的逻辑可以说是合理的，但尚未提出明确的规则来从其组成部分的含义推导出ABC - D的含义。我们比较两种分析方法。一种假定了语义组合性的有限实例（“最小组合性”）；另一种则不采用组合性，而是使用更复杂的语用学方法（“鸟类含义”）。最小组合性认为ABC和D的组合与两个独立发声的情况相比，偏离程度最小：ABC意味着“有某种东西引发警报”，D意味着“有某种东西引发召集”，而ABC - D意味着“有某种东西引发警报和召集”。相比之下，ABC和D作为独立发声会产生较弱的表述，即：“有某种东西引发警报，并且有某种东西引发召集”，两者之间没有任何“约束”。第二种理论，鸟类含义，只要求ABC - D比ABC和/或D提供更多信息。它基于为几种猴子物种提出的观点，即信息较少的叫声与信息较多的叫声相互竞争（“信息性原则”）：当单独发出时，ABC和D会引发一种推断，即ABC - D是假的。我们解释了最小组合性和鸟类含义是如何进化的，并比较了这两种理论的预测。最后，我们将讨论扩展到一些可能引发相关理论问题的黑猩猩和狐獴的叫声序列。
