Coordination
While we have not found any kind of subordination in systems of animal communication, some patterns of coordinating concatenation have been reported (Fitch and Hauser 2004: 377). Premack’s (1976: 324) findings suggest that the trained chimpanzee Sarah acquired the ability to conjoin nouns: Sarah could combine two and sometimes three nouns having the same syntactic function in the same sentence, all of them as objects of one and the same verb, for example, ‘‘Mary give Sarah apple banana orange.’’ This finding may be taken as evidence that this chimpanzee acquired the ability of conjoining noun-like form–meaning pairings; whether it is suggestive of equi-verb deletion, as Premack suggests, is an issue that cannot be resolved without further information.
Another example is provided by bottle-nosed dolphins. The dolphin Phoenix was given the instruction to act on a sequence of two propositions each consisting of an object and an action. When told, for example, PIPE TAIL-TOUCH PIPE OVER she swam to the pipe, touched it with her tail flukes, and then jumped over it. Without any specific training or reinforcement history, Phoenix carried out instructions on such coordinated propositions successfully in eleven out of fifteen cases (Herman 1987: 24).
Serial verb constructions in chimpanzees? The chimpanzee Sarah was not only able to conjoin nouns but also verbal items. Early in training, Sarah was given only one action name at a time, one appropriate to the point in the sequence to which the action had progressed. Later, several verbs were made available to her at the same time, enabling her to write, ‘‘Wash apple, cut apple,’’ or ‘‘Cut apple, give apple,’’ etc. But Sarah did not write pairs of sentences of this kind; rather, she wrote instead ‘‘Cut give apple,’’ and ‘‘Wash give apple,’’ even if not always observing the correct order (Premack 1976: 244, 321). Such complex forms involving sequences of two verbs might be suggestive of verb serialization, which did not occur until after she had first produced equivalent outcomes by using multiple simpler sentences; for example, she did not write ‘‘Wash give apple’’ until she had written ‘‘Wash apple’’ and ‘‘Give apple’’ many times before (Premack 1976: 324). Much the same behavior was shown by the other two chimpanzees Peony and Elizabeth, who wrote, for example, ‘‘Elizabeth apple wash cut’’ in describing their own action or ‘‘Amy apple cut insert’’ in referring to the trainer Amy as an agent.
Once again, Premack (1976: 324) accounts for this behavior in terms of equi-noun deletion of (underlying) full sentences; but it is equally possible to maintain that these chimpanzees simply conjoined verbs in a fashion roughly comparable to serial verb constructions (Aikhenvald and Dixon 2006). However this may be, what is remarkable about this achievement is that it was created by these animals apparently without any model provided by their human trainers:
Their use of conjunction was impressive, in part because of its several forms and the different contexts in which it occurred, but more important because it was invented by them. No aspect of conjunction was taught Sarah or the other subjects. The stringing together of object names in one case and action names in the other was their contribution. (Premack 1976: 321)
Causal relations? Can animals understand the nature of logical relations obtaining between different situations or propositional contents? Premack (1976: 336–7) argues that chimpanzees can make a causal analysis of their experiences. His subject was given an intact object, a blank space, and the same object in a changed or terminal state, along with various alternatives, and was encouraged to complete the sequence by placing one of the alternatives in the blank space. For example, the subject was given such items as an intact apple and a cut apple; a dry sponge and a wet sponge; a clear piece of paper and one with writing on it. In these cases, the three alternatives given the subject consisted of a knife, a bowl of water, and a writing instrument. Premack (1976: 337) found that three of the four chimpanzees tested in this way required no more than general adaptation to the test format before responding correctly. Their ability to place the knife between the intact and severed apple, the water between the dry and wet sponge, and the pencil between the unmarked and pencil-marked paper showed that they correctly identified the instrument or operator needed to change each object from its initial to its final state.
Can this be taken to substantiate Premack’s claim that chimpanzees are capable of making causal analyses? It would seem that the answer is not clearly in the affirmative. The behavior described may simply suggest that these animals associate three different objects as belonging together on account of past experiences.
