The Articulate Mammal (8 page)

‘What ho!’ I said.

‘What ho!’ said Motty.

‘What ho! What ho!’

‘What ho! What ho! What ho!’

As we can see, Motty and the narrator have no idea what to say to one another. Nevertheless, they know that they have to take it in turns to talk. Such turntaking begins at a very early age. Even mothers and babies alternate as they mouth nonsense syllables at each other. Once again, this is not an exclusively human characteristic, since birds sometimes sing duets together. One bird sings a few phrases, then pauses while the other has its turn, a phenomenon known as antiphonal singing.

The seventh property,
duality
or
double-articulation
, means that language is organized into two ‘layers’: the basic sound units of speech, such as P, I, G, are normally meaningless by themselves. They only become meaningful when combined into sequences such as P-I-G PIG. This property is sometimes claimed to be unique to humans. But this is not so. Duality is also present in birdsong, where each individual note is itself meaningless – it is the combinations of notes which convey meaningful messages. So once again we have not found a critical difference between animals and humans in their use of this feature.

A more important characteristic of language is
displacement
, the ability to refer to things far removed in time and place. Humans frequently say things such as ‘My Aunt Matilda, who lives in Australia, cracked her knee-cap last week.’ It may be impossible for an animal to convey a similar item of information. However, as in the case of other design features, it is sometimes difficult to decide whether displacement is present in an animal’s communication system. A bird frequently continues to give alarm cries long after the disappearance of a cat which was stalking it. Is this displacement or not? The answer is unclear. Definite examples of displacement are hard to find. But it is undoubtedly found in bee communication (von Frisch 1950, 1954, 1967). When a worker bee finds a source of nectar it returns to the hive to perform a complex dance which informs the other bees of its location. It does a ‘round dance’, which involves turning round in circles if the nectar is close to the hive, and a ‘waggle dance’ in which it wiggles its tail from side to side if it is far away. The other bees work out the distance by noting the tempo of its waggles, and discover what kind of flower to look for by smelling the scent on its body. Bees, incidentally, are not deaf, as was once assumed. As a forager bee dances, it beats its wings. The bees in a dark hive can hear and interpret the wing-beats even when they cannot see the dance (Kirchner and Towne 1994).

This is an unusual ability – but even this degree of displacement is considerably less than that found in human speech. The bee cannot inform other
bees about anything further removed than the nectar patch it has just visited. It cannot say ‘The day before yesterday we visited a lovely clump of flowers, let’s go and see if they are still there’ – it can only say, ‘Come to the nectar I have just visited.’ Nor can it communicate about anything further away in place. It could not say ‘I wonder whether there’s good nectar in Siberia.’ So displacement in bee communication is strictly limited to the number of miles a bee can easily fly, and the time it takes to do this. At last, it seems we may have found a feature which seems to be of importance in human language, and is only partially present in non-human communication.

The ninth feature,
structure-dependence
, was discussed in
Chapter 1
. Humans do not just apply simple recognition or counting techniques when they speak to one another. They automatically recognize the patterned nature of language, and manipulate ‘structured chunks’. For example, they understand that a group of words can sometimes be the structural equivalent of one:

And they can re-arrange these chunks according to conventional ‘rules’:

As far as we know, animals do not use structure-dependent operations. We do not know enough about the communication of all animals to be sure, but no definite example has yet been found.

The next feature, one that seems to be of overwhelming importance, and possibly unique to humans, is the ability to produce and understand an indefinite number of novel utterances. This property of language has several different names. Chomsky calls it
creativity
(
Chapter 1
), others call it
openness
or
productivity
. Humans can talk about anything they like – even a platypus falling backwards downstairs – without causing any linguistic problems to themselves or the hearers. They can say
what
they want
when
they want. If it thunders, they do not automatically utter a set phrase, such as ‘It’s thundering, run for cover.’ They can say ‘Isn’t the lightning pretty’ or ‘Better get the dog in’ or ‘Thunder is two dragons colliding in tin tubs, according to a Chinese legend.’

In contrast, most animals have a fixed number of signals which convey a set number of messages, sent in clearly definable circumstances. A North American cicada can give four signals only. It emits a ‘disturbance squawk’ when it is seized, picked up or eaten. A ‘congregation call’ seems to mean ‘Let’s all get
together and sing in chorus!’ A preliminary courtship call (an invitation?) is uttered when a female is several inches away. An advanced courtship call (a buzz of triumph?) occurs when the female is almost within grasp (McNeill 1970). Even the impressive vervet monkey has only thirty-six distinct vocal sounds in its repertoire. And as this includes sneezing and vomiting, the actual number used for communication is several fewer. Within this range, choice is limited, since circumstances generally dictate which call to use. An infant separated from its mother gives the lost
rrah
cry. A female who wishes to deter an amorous male gives the ‘anti-copulatory squeal-scream’ (Struhsaker 1967).

But perhaps it is unfair to concentrate on cicadas and monkeys. Compared with these, bees, dolphins and birds have extremely sophisticated communication systems. Yet researchers have reluctantly concluded that even they seem unable to say anything new. The bees were investigated by the famous ‘bee-man’, Karl von Frisch. He noted that worker bees normally give information about the
horizontal
distance and direction of a source of nectar. If bee communication is in any sense ‘open’, then a worker bee should be able to inform the other bees about
vertical
distance and direction if necessary. He tested this idea by placing a hive of bees at the foot of a radio beacon, and a supply of sugar water at the top. But the bees who were shown the sugar water were unable to tell the other bees where to find it. They duly performed a ‘round dance’, indicating that a source of nectar was in the vicinity of the hive – and then for several hours their comrades flew in all directions
except
upwards looking for the honey source. Eventually, they gave up the search. As von Frisch noted, ‘The bees have no words for “up” in their language. There are no flowers in the clouds’ (von Frisch 1954: 139). Failure to communicate this extra item of information means that bee communication cannot be regarded as ‘open-ended’ in the same way that human language is openended.

The dolphin experiments carried out by Jarvis Bastian were considerably more exciting – though in the long run equally disappointing. Bastian tried to teach a male dolphin, Buzz, and a female, Doris, to communicate across an opaque barrier.

First of all, while they were still together, Bastian taught the dolphins to press paddles when they saw a light. If the light was kept steady, they had to press the right-hand paddle first. If it flashed, the left-hand one. When they did this correctly they were rewarded with fish.

As soon as they had learned this manoeuvre, he separated them. They could now hear one another, but they could not see one another. The paddles and light were set up in the same way, except that the light that indicated which paddle to press first was seen only by Doris. But in order to get fish both dolphins had to press the levers in the correct order. Doris had to
tell
Buzz which this was, as only she could see the light. Amazingly, the dolphins
‘demonstrated essentially perfect success over thousands of trials at this task’ (Evans and Bastian 1969: 432). It seemed that dolphins could
talk
! Doris was conveying novel information through an opaque barrier!

But it later became clear that the achievement was considerably less clever. Even while the dolphins were together Doris had become accustomed to making certain sounds when the light was flashing and different sounds when it was continuous. When the dolphins were separated she continued the habit. And Buzz had, of course, already learnt which sounds of Doris’s to associate with which light. Doris was therefore not ‘talking creatively’.

So not even dolphins have a ‘creative’ communication system in the human sense – even though they make underwater ‘clicks’ which are astonishingly sophisticated (Au 1993). Their so-called clicks are intermittent bursts of sound, each of which lasts less than a thousandth of a second, in frequencies beyond the range of human hearing. By listening for their echoes, a dolphin can locate a tiny eel in a bed of mud, or a fish the size of a ping-pong ball 70 metres away. The dolphin first sends out a very general click, then progressively modifies it as it gets echoes back, so allowing it to get more and more accurate information. As far as we know, this is restricted to the size and location of shapes – though one interesting recent proposal is that each individual dolphin might have its own ‘signature whistle’ which could be regarded as its ‘name’.

Finally, we come to birds. They also have failed to give any evidence of creativity. We might expect them to communicate about a multiplicity of situations, since the individual notes of a bird’s song can be combined in an indefinite number of ways. But as far as researchers can judge, birdsong deals
above all with just two aspects of life: courting a mate, and the marking of territory (Nottebohm 1975; Marler 1991). A bird who appears to humans to be indulging in an operatic aria on the pleasures of life is more likely to be warning other birds not to encroach on its own particular area of woodland.

It seems, then, that animals cannot send truly novel messages, and that Ogden Nash encapsulates a modicum of truth in his comment:

The song of canaries

never varies.

And so does Alice in her complaint about kittens:

It is a very inconvenient habit of kittens that, whatever you say to them, they always purr. If they would only purr for ‘yes’ and mew for ‘no’, or any rule of that sort, so that one could keep up a conversation! But how
can
you talk with a person if they
always
say the same thing?