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Zuberbühler, Klaus

Nom
Zuberbühler, Klaus
Affiliation principale
Fonction
Professeur ordinaire
Email
klaus.zuberbuehler@unine.ch
Identifiants
https://libra.unine.ch/handle/123456789/670
_
0000-0001-8378-088X

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  • Publication
    Métadonnées seulement
    Pyow-hack revisited: Two analyses of Putty-nosed monkey alarm calls
    (2016)
    Schlenker, Philippe
    ;
    Chemla, Emmanuel
    ;
    Arnold, Kate
    ;
    Zuberbühler, Klaus 
    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 Zuberbuhler 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 Zuberbuhler claimed that pyow-hack sequences are syntactically combinatorial but not semantically compositional because their meaning cannot 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 do not. 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. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V.
  • Publication
    Métadonnées seulement
    Monkey semantics: two 'dialects' of Campbell's monkey alarm calls
    (2014)
    Schlenker, Philippe
    ;
    Chemla, Emmanuel
    ;
    Arnold, Kate
    ;
    Lemasson, Alban
    ;
    Ouattara, Karim
    ;
    Keenan, Sumir
    ;
    Stephan, Claudia 
    ;
    Ryder, Robin
    ;
    Zuberbühler, Klaus 
    We develop a formal semantic analysis of the alarm calls used by Campbell's monkeys in the Tai forest (Ivory Coast) and on Tiwai island (Sierra Leone)-two sites that differ in the main predators that the monkeys are exposed to (eagles on Tiwai vs. eagles and leopards in Tai). Building on data discussed in Ouattara et al. (PLoS ONE 4(11):e7808, 2009a; PNAS 106(51): 22026-22031, 2009b and Arnold et al. (Population differences in wild Campbell's monkeys alarm call use, 2013), we argue that on both sites alarm calls include the roots krak and hok, which can optionally be affixed with -oo, a kind of attenuating suffix; in addition, sentences can start with boom boom, which indicates that the context is not one of predation. In line with Arnold et al., we show that the meaning of the roots is not quite the same in Tai and on Tiwai: krak often functions as a leopard alarm call in Tai, but as a general alarm call on Tiwai. We develop models based on a compositional semantics in which concatenation is interpreted as conjunction, roots have lexical meanings, -oo is an attenuating suffix, and an all-purpose alarm parameter is raised with each individual call. The first model accounts for the difference between Tai and Tiwai by way of different lexical entries for krak. The second model gives the same underspecified entry to krak in both locations (= general alarm call), but it makes use of a competition mechanism akin to scalar implicatures. In Tai, strengthening yields a meaning equivalent to non-aerial dangerous predator and turns out to single out leopards. On Tiwai, strengthening yields a nearly contradictory meaning due to the absence of ground predators, and only the unstrengthened meaning is used.
  • Publication
    Métadonnées seulement
  • Publication
    Métadonnées seulement