CALL FOR PAPERS: Animal/Language: An Interdisciplinary Conference

2019

The boundaries and complementarities relating animals and language have always captured the human imagination. Animal/Language: An Interdisciplinary Conference engages with a central feature of what is becoming known as the "animal turn" in the humanities: the recognition that animals and language have a complicated relationship with one another in human understanding. What it means to be "human" has often been thought through and against the figure of the "animal", with "language" traditionally seen as constitutive of human identity. However, the desire for-and the realities of-communication between animals and humans and among animals themselves put pressure on these mechanisms of distinction in ways that can be both exciting and unsettling. The "Animal" in the Humanities Research Group was founded in 2017 with the support of the Humanities Center at Texas Tech in order to foster interdisciplinary, collaborative inquiry into the role played by both "the animal" and real animals in human intellectual landscapes, historical and contemporary. To that end, this international conference brings together scholars from a range of disciplines, including literature, history, anthropology, philosophy, religious studies, the visual arts, the psychological sciences, and companion animal science in order to share their research, investigate the networks of relationships connecting animals, humans, and language in diverse historical, cultural, social, and philosophical contexts, and explore what particular perspectives on these questions reveal about the groups that hold them.

Society & Animals, 2006

Animals and Their People: Connecting East and West in Cultural Animal Studies, 2018

2020

Drawing on analyses of scientific knowledge and language from Foucault and Lyotard, this article explores the role of language in human-animal relations and human-animal ethics.

Master Thesis, 2020

In the light of ongoing research on other animal species and their communicative capacities, we may wonder how much other-than-human animals would have to say if we knew how to listen. Yet, even though scientific studies continue to yield fascinating insights into animal languages, other animals are still widely perceived as ‘voiceless others’ – beings without language who are too alien from us to be understood. This linguistic bias obscures not only their remarkable communicative abilities but also our moral responsibility of responding to them. Departing from the assumption that other animals do indeed speak and that dialogue between 'us' and 'them' is possible, this project explores whether there is a way from the long-assumed muteness of our animal others toward forms of communicating, including nonverbal behaviours, we share with them.

Permalink: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/3b7977qr Acknowledgements: I would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. This project was supported in part by a full doctoral scholarship of the government of Colombia (Colciencias) and by the Fundación Universitaria Los Libertadores, in Bogotá, Colombia.

2021

This study aims at reviewing a bulk of related studies, and some verses from the Holly Qur'an in order to discover some mysteries of human animal communication. We believe that the majority of the previous studies concern themselves with human attempts to teach human speech to animals. There are a lot of mysteries that surround human animal communication. Furthermore, there are some intersections between human and animals’ ways of interaction. We believe that human speech is one of the most amazing human properties; at the same time, we believe that animals have very advanced ways of communication. However, humans and animals have the access to be involved in interaction and communications with each other and with other species of animals. Our mere observations could maintain this hypothesis of joined human animal communications. This study is an attempt to establish a theoretical framework on which humans and animals can interact and communicate jointly among themselves and oth...

In this article, I will attempt to link three areas, which are usually discussed as completely separate entities: emotions, the ways in which animals communicate, and the source of the unique language of humans. Through the linking and construction of these subjects, the article proposes a comprehensive relational framework, which can encompass many findings and appraise ideas from various disciplines: brain research, ethology, linguistics, psychology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and more.1 Over the course of organizing and building up the material, I understood that the process of cataloging and naming phenomena had a seemingly decisive influence on the way in which these phenomena were perceived and on cognitive patterns related to these areas of thought. This has prevented generations of scientists from understanding the necessary connection between emotions and the ways in which animals communicate. The link between these two subjects has made it possible to identify the way in which human language split off and diverged from that of other species.

2022

Detailed comparative studies have revealed many surface similarities between linguistic communication and the communication of non-humans. How should we interpret these discoveries in linguistic and cognitive perspective? We review the literature with a specific focus on analogy (similar features and function but not shared ancestry) and homology (shared ancestry). We conclude that combinatorial features of animal communication are analogous but not homologous to natural language. Homologies are found instead in cognitive capacities of attention manipulation, which are enriched in humans, making possible many distinctive forms of communication, including language use. We hence present a new, graded taxonomy of means of attention manipulation, including a new class we call ‘Ladyginian’, which is related to but slightly broader than the more familiar class of ‘Gricean’ interaction. Only in the latter do actors have the goal to reveal specifically informative intentions. Great ape inte...