Reflection on the Borders of Language and Speech in Light of Discoveries in Zoosemiotics
The main problem I address in this article are the boundaries of language and speech, established jointly by social sciences, humanities, mathematics, and life sciences, in particular by what is a merger of semiotics and biology, that is, biosemiotics. I advance a thesis according to which biocommunication skills of both human and non-human animals are divided by a chasm that is simultaneously quantitative and qualitative, where: phylogenetic (pre-)adaptations and ontological (pre-)dispositions of human and non-human animals are on the one hand communicatively discrete, while on the other, cognitively and behaviourly, continual. Based on the results of empirical studies which I quote and upon which I comment, it stands to reason that there exist the biocommunication features which are inherently human.
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