Читать книгу When Animals Speak - Eva Meijer - Страница 27

This brief investigation into the language games of mimicry, alarm calls, grammar, and meta-communication shows us that there is great variety in the ways that other animals express themselves, make sense of the world around them, respond, and connect to others. To further develop a non-anthropocentric view of language, however, it is not enough to simply study other animal languages. While existing concepts, such as mimicry and grammar, can function as tools in understanding other animals and working towards better relations, they should rather be seen as starting points, not end points. In this chapter, the focus has mostly been on the scientific study of animal languages, which is itself a specific set of language games. In these language games non-human animals often do not have access to how experiments are set up, even though they clearly exercise agency. However, humans and other animals also live together, and form common worlds in which language often plays a formative role. In the next chapter I turn to investigating these relations further by focusing on the relation between language and world and the building of common interspecies worlds.