Talk:Animal language

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• Generative Grammar is part of the Nativist posistion. The paragraph that was based on the assumption that these were two different and opposing posistions has been removed.

(above by archgoon, unsigned)

• Planned edits:

1. Will revert the above deleted paragraph (comparison here) with the correction as noted by Archgoon. Emergentism or related bottom-up approaches were intended, and the use of generativism was indeed erroneous.
2. Will edit text to be encyclopedic
3. Will remove refernces to animal communication, which are outside the definition of 'animal language'
4. NOTE: significant overlap exists between this article and Great Ape language. Merging may be indicated, but will be much work to combine the information in both articles.Santaduck 22:42, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Regarding the following sentence:

'Productivity:' A finite number of units can be used to create an infinite number of ideas.(some say this doesn't happen in human language)

Who says it doesn't happen? It should be cited. As a Linguistics student, I can say that this is a standard position in Linguistics, so if someone disagrees, it should say who. If no one adds that in a few days, I'll edit that out of the sentence. Torgo 07:23, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

Let's be clear - linguists don't standardly hold that "units can be used to create...ideas" but that finite linguistic resources can be used to produce indefinitely many utterances and/or sentences. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 144.82.107.18 (talk • contribs).

I deleted the parenthetical phrase from the above sentence, and changed 'ideas' to 'utterances', which is technically more correct, and maybe that was the reason "some" people (whoever they are) object to the claim. Torgo 10:21, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Neutrality and verify

There are an astounding number of papers referenced at the bottom, but little inline citation so I have added the verify tag and some fact tags. The page appears to have been written from a pro-Animal language POV, per example below:

In 1984 during this anti-Animal Language backlash, Louis Herman published an account of artificial

Why is this called the "anti-Animal language backlash"? That does not appear to be NPOV wording to me. There are other examples throughout the article so I have added the neutrality tag. - FrancisTyers 17:56, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

• Thank you for your attention. 4 comments: 1) NPOV should be addressed in this article primarily via definition of terms. In general, differing POVs arise from different assumptions, e.g. on what language is, or what the interpretation of particular animal results are. Thus the simple dichotomy between "pro" and "against" animal language camps is inaccurate, and not informative for the general reader. There are various camps within each of many groups: linguistic specialists (nativists and non-nativists), animal behavior specialists, psychology-behaviorists, psychology-cognitive scientists, language evolution writers, artificial language scientists, and more. A ground-up rewrite listing each camp, assumptions, and some key conclusions would be best. In summary, to simply contrast the two sides of PRO and AGAINST would be insufficient. 2) The word backlash was intended as NPOV. It neither approves or disapproves of anti-animal langauge sentiment that was prevalent in that era. The backlash itself is easily verifiable by historical commentary on the Herb Terrace critique, as well as the simple fact that the relevant cognitive and linguistic peer review journals simply stopped publishing papers on this topic. 3) NPOV seems to be a huge concern in the great ape language article as well. 4) The number of references are not intended as citations for existing text. It is a resource, since most available texts are rarely written from NPOV, it is difficult for the general reader to find a nearly complete list of relevant literature in any single resource. This article can provide that resource, and perhaps should be renamed to Further reading, rather than references. Also, at the time these citations were added, the article was a barebones and inadequate summary of animal communication systems (i.e. not animal language) with a mis-applied list of Hockett's design features from more than 40 years ago-- as such these references were essentially intended a stub for a future comprehensive article.Santaduck 08:07, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Multiple articles on great ape language

This article is one of at least 16 articles on Wikipedia about the fascinating but controversial subject of Great ape language. These articles have been created independently and contain much interesting but uncoordinated information, varying levels of NPOV, and differences in categorization, stubbing, and references. Those of us working on them should explore better coordinating our efforts so as to share the best we have created and avoid unnecessary duplication. I have somewhat arbitrarily put the list of 16 articles on Talk:Great ape language and would encourage us to informally coordinate efforts there on this topic in particular. Martinp 18:00, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

• comment: I would argue that great ape language is a subset of animal language, in the encyclopedic sense, and that the bias of great ape langauge being the parent topic is perhaps due more to the greater awareness of animal models in the popular press, which should not be the criterion for encyclopedic categorization-- in other words animal language should be the parent topic. However, strongly agree that some form of coordination is essential. If that fails, perhaps animal language should simply list contrasting models and POVs, pointing to individual fragmented articles-- although this is not an ideal solution, perhaps ht of conflicting parties, the end result of a fragmented set of entries would provide more useful reading material to the browsing general reader. Santaduck 08:11, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Is this actually the title??

"Please suck my balls parse the sentence", in bibliography. Turns nothing in google, either. No, that's not the title. While linguists are occasionally vulgar, this seems to have been vandalism in the following edit:

09:07, 21 June 2006 62.231.155.5 (Talk) (→Literature)

I corrected it and one other vandalism from the same edit recently. Thanks! --RockRockOn 05:45, 17 November 2006 (UTC)