Schlenker, Philippe; Chemla, Emmanuel;
Arnold, Kate; Zuberbühler,
Klaus:
2014. Pyow-Hack Revisited: Two Analyses of Putty-nosed Monkey Alarm
Calls. Manuscript.
[Full
paper at LingBuzz]
Abstract: Male
putty-nosed monkeys have two main alarm calls, pyows and hacks. While pyows have a broad distribution
suggestive of a general call, hacks are
often indicative of eagles. In a series of articles, Arnold and
Zuberbühler showed that putty-nosed monkeys sometimes produce
distinct pyow-hack sequences made of a small number of pyows followed by a small number of
hacks; and that these are
predictive of group movement. Arnold and Zuberbühler claimed that
pyow-hack sequences are syntactically combinatorial but not
semantically compositional because their meaning can't be derived from
the meanings of their component parts. We compare two theories of this
phenomenon. One formalizes and modifies the non-compositional theory.
The other presents a semantically compositional alternative based on
weak meanings for pyow
('general alarm') and hack
('non-ground movement'), combined with pragmatic principles of
competition; a crucial one is an 'Urgency Principle' whereby calls that
provide information about the nature/location of a threat must come
before calls that don't. Semantically, pyow-hack sequences are
compatible with any kind of situation involving (moving) aerial
predators or (arboreal) movement of the monkeys themselves. But in the
former case, hacks provide
information about the location of a threat, and hence should appear at
the beginning of sequences. As a result, pyow-hack sequences can only
be used for non-threat-related situations involving movement, hence a
possible inference that they involve group movement. Without
adjudicating the debate, we argue that a formal analysis can help
clarify competing theories and derive new predictions that might decide
between them.