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Do Animal Vocalisations have Semantic Properties? Language is often selected as the main feature which separates man from other living creatures. For Descartes 'it is a very remarkable thing that there are no men so dull and stupid, not even lunatics, that they cannot arrange various words and form a sentence to make their thoughts understood; but no other animal, however perfect or well bred can do the like'. The presence of a language in a non-human species would clearly be inconceivable a philosopher such as Descartes. Whilst it cannot be argued that the human languages are very complex systems with many rules and infinite possibilities of utterances, there are some methods of communication of animals that are comparable to human language, which thus casts some degree of doubt on this supposed human-specificity of language. Semanticity is a suggested test for the language ability of any species. It is the use...

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