Sobre la relación entre el lenguaje y la comunicación animal

Abstract

Víctor M. LONGA: On the Relationship Between Language and Animal Communication. The relationship between animal communication and human language has been and is very controversial. Many authors defend continuism, according to which language is derived from animal communication by way of a process of descent-with-modification. This assumption has led to the proposal of primitive forms of language for numerous species. The work at hand critically analyzes this strong continuism and offers arguments which point to its infeasibility. At the same time, it suggests that the available evidence does not allow one to go beyond a weak continuism, limited to some general abilities (that is to say, not linguistic nor prelinguistic per se) of the vocal and conceptual type. Finally, it defends that it is not possible to track reasonable antecedents of the lexical, and above all of the syntactic type.