Song of a Reformed Headhunter

frm Barbara J. King's review of Gregory Radick's The Simian Tongue: The long debate about animal language , and Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought: Language as a window into human nature : In his zoo work, [Richard] Garner invented what we would today call the primate playback experiment. . . . This re-emergence [of the playback technique] is mainly due to the work of the British ornithologist-turned-primatologist Peter Marler. . . . The Amboseli vervets made scientic history. When the vervets heard a played-back call originally uttered in the presence of an eagle, they fled into the bushes. For leopard and snake calls, they responded in distinct but similarly adaptive ways. Seufarth, Cheney and Marler proved that the calls contained not just high-arousal cues but specific information about the environment. * "Linguists," [Pinker] writes, "call the inventory of concepts and the schemes that combine them 'conceptual semantics'. Conceptual semantics--...