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THOMAS A. SEBEOK

The Notion of Zoosemiotics

The term zoosemiotics—constructed in an exchange between Rulon Wells and me—is proposed for the discipline, within which the science of signs intersects with ethology, devoted to the scientific study of signalling behavior in and across animal species. A survey of the vast and widely ramified literature of ethology, supplemented by repeated spot checks of ongoing research projects, reveals that the study of signaling behavior in animals has, by and large, been taxonomically parochial: even Darwin’s great pioneer work, on The expression of the emotions in man and animals (1872), dealt, in the main, with the domestic cat and dog. A great variety of animals has since been more or less minutely scrutinized, both in the natural environment (after J. S. Huxley and K. Lorenz) and in captivity (after H. Lissman and N. Tinbergen), but usually in one particular species (or, sometimes, in closely related forms, say, of the genus Apis) rather than guided by overarching theoretical considerations relevant to problems of communication in general, including especially speech. The task for the immediate future will be to treat, comprehensively and exhaustively, the achievements of zoosemiotics from Darwin through J. von Uexküll to the present day; to arrange and display the data in a format relevant to the study of language, that is, by matching logical concepts derived from sociobiology with those developed in linguistics; and, using each species, so to say, as a miniature paradigm which throws light upon language observed as a peculiar combination of distinctive features, of which all or almost all components, considered alone, have their separate evolutionary roots (cf. Koehler 1956), to consolidate and build upon what has been established about the protocultural foundations of human adaptation.

Whitney’s conception of language as a social institution, unfolded in necessary antithesis to Schleicher’s simple-minded Darwinism, is now itself in need of revision as we recollect L. Bloomfield’s aphorism (1939): “Language creates and exemplifies a twofold value of some human actions.” Language has, as he put it, both a biophysical and a biosocial aspect. Speech is, of course, a biological phenomenon in several related senses. Since all systems in science have a biological component, the linguistic system observed includes the linguist-observer (cf. Simpson 1963). Speech, furthermore, is carried on by human beings, a species of animal; it is not only a part of animal behavior but undoubtedly the principal means of biological adaptation for man, an evolutionary specialization that arose from prehuman behavioral adaptation of which we seek to trace the paths as one objective of zoosemiotics.

In 1936 (1.254) Jakobson asked, in Copenhagen: “Est-il besoin aujourd’hui de rappeler que la linguistique appartient aux sciences sociales et non à l’histoire naturelle? N’est-ce pas un truisme évident?” [“Is it necessary today to recall that the study of language pertains to the social sciences, and not to natural history? Is this not an evident truism?”] Twenty-five years later, he himself gave the answer as, in Helsinki (1962), he called attention to the “direct homology between the logic of molecular and phonemic codes”, implying a vision of new and startling dimensions: the convergence of the science of genetics with the science of linguistics. A fundamental unity of viewpoint has been provided by the discovery that the problem of heredity lies, in effect, in the decipherment of a script, that genes are sections of the molecular chains of DNA which contain messages coded in particular sequences of nucleotide bases (Dobzhansky 1962: 39), in a manner persuasively reminiscent of the way in which bundles of binary features are linked into sequences of phonemes. Genetics and linguistics thus emerge as autonomous yet sister disciplines in the larger field of communication sciences, to which, on the molar level, zoosemiotics also contributes.