April 22, 2022
New preprint from Thom Scott-Phillips and Christophe Heintz: 'Animal communication in linguistic perspective'.
It is a review of the literature on animal communication. We focus on homologies (shared ancestry) and analogies (similar features & function, not shared ancestry) as ways to understand better animal communication. We contrast:
- the *redescription* of animal communication which is fruitfully be done using linguistic concepts and making analogies
- the investigation of the *cognitive bases* of communication accross species, which strongly benefits from an analysis of homologies.
We distinguish types of social intentions to better identify the cognitive bases of ostensive communication.