Human-animal vocal communication, a (now) legitimate topic for linguistics and the analysis of social interaction

Abstract

The study of animal vocalizations has long been the exclusive domain of animal behavior research, which studies animal vocal productions for various reasons, but mostly as an inquiry into the origins of human verbal language. Recently, insights from linguistics have followed the trend set by what is sometimes referred to as an “animal turn” in the social sciences and humanities. This has resulted in treating the interaction between humans and non-human animals as a research topic in its own right. The part of linguistics interested in the multimodal analysis of social interaction was particularly well-equipped to deal with those non-verbal, though meaningful and (sometimes) cooperative, interactions. This permitted (i) a reconsideration of classic linguistic phenomena (e.g., participation, sequentiality, intentionality) and (ii) detailed analyses of the interactional production of meaning in interspecies interaction, while eschewing speculations about the origin of language. This contribution outlines these new developments, and shows how the articles of this Special Issue on “sound patterns in interspecies interaction” specifically contribute to them.