Animal Communication by Pheromones describes how the behavior of animals is controlled and influenced by pheromone communication. This book describes the mechanism through which the social animals interact with each other and by which they are organized according to their relative statuses and functions. The text then describes the pheromonal communication system; the mechanisms of movement and orientation to pheromone sources; and recognition, aggregation, and dispersion pheromone behaviors. The sex pheromone behavior; the environmental and physiological control of sex pheromone behavior; and the aspects of pheromones as stimulators or inhibitors of aggression are considered. The book further tackles sex pheromones; reproductive isolation; and the evolution of pheromonal communication. Entomologists and animal scientists will find the book useful.

This monograph is about new perspective in animal studies methodology, by using concepts and tools from the field of semiotics. It proposes a reflexion on current challenges and issues in the ethology field, and introduces different semiotics – biosemiotics, zoosemiotics – as potential methodological solutions. The chapters cover many aspects of ethology where semiotics can be a helpful hand: studies of language, culture, cognition or emotions, issues about complex, endangered or variable species. It explains why these points are difficult to study for actual ethology, why they still matter for researchers, biodiversity actors or wildlife programs, and how an interdisciplinary study with a semiotic point of view can help understand them. This book will appeal to a wide readership, from researchers and academics in living sciences as well as in linguistics fields, to other professionals – veterinarian, wildlife managers, zookeepers, and many others – who feel the need to better understand some aspects of animals they are working with. Students with animal focus should read this book as an introduction to interdisciplinary methodology, and a proposition to work differently with animals.

When this classic work was first published in 1975, it created a new discipline and started a tumultuous round in the age-old nature versus nurture debate. Although voted by officers and fellows of the international Animal Behavior Society the most important book on animal behavior of all time, Sociobiology is probably more widely known as the object of bitter attacks by social scientists and other scholars who opposed its claim that human social behavior, indeed human nature, has a biological foundation. The controversy surrounding the publication of the book reverberates to the present day. In the introduction to this Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition, Edward O. Wilson shows how research in human genetics and neuroscience has strengthened the case for a biological understanding of human nature. Human sociobiology, now often called evolutionary psychology, has in the last quarter of a century emerged as its own field of study, drawing on theory and data from both biology and the social sciences. For its still fresh and beautifully illustrated descriptions of animal societies, and its importance as a crucial step forward in the understanding of human beings, this anniversary edition of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis will be welcomed by a new generation of students and scholars in all branches of learning.

The Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics is a unique reference work for students and teachers of linguistics. The highly regarded second edition of the Lexikon der Sprachwissenschaft by Hadumod Bussmann has been specifically adapted by a team of over thirty specialist linguists to form the most comprehensive and up-to-date work of its kind in the English language. In over 2,500 entries, the Dictionary provides an exhaustive survey of the key terminology and languages of more than 30 subdisciplines of linguistics. With its term-based approach and emphasis on clear analysis, it complements perfectly Routledge's established range of reference material in the field of linguistics.

Recent studies of vocal development in infants have shed new light on old questions of how the speech capacity is founded and how it may have evolved in the human species. Vocalizations in the very first months of life appear to provide previously unrecognized clues to the earliest steps in the process by which language came to exist and the processes by which communicative disorders arise. Perhaps the most interesting sounds made by infants are the uniquely human 'protophones' (loosely, 'babbling'), the precursors to speech. Kimbrough Oller argues that these are most profitably interpreted in the context of a new infrastructural model of speech. The model details the manner in which well-formed speech units are constructed, and it reveals how infant vocalizations mature through the first months of life by increasingly adhering to the rules of well-formed speech. He lays out many advantages of an infrastructural approach. Infrastructural interpretation illuminates the significance of vocal stages, and highlights clinically significant deviations, such as the previously unnoticed delays in vocal development that occur in deaf infants. An infrastructural approach also specifies potential paths of evolution for vocal communicative systems. Infrastructural properties and principles of potential communicative systems prove to be organized according to a natural logic--some properties and principles naturally presuppose others. Consequently some paths of evolution are likely while others can be ruled out. An infrastructural analysis also provides a stable basis for comparisons across species, comparisons that show how human vocal capabilities outstrip those of their primate relatives even during the first months of human infancy. The Emergence of the Speech Capacity will challenge psychologists, linguists, speech pathologists, and primatologists alike to rethink the ways they categorize and describe communication. Oller's infraphonological model permits provocative reconceptualizations of the ways infant vocalizations progress systematically toward speech, insightful comparisons between speech and the vocal systems of other species, and fruitful speculations about the origins of language.

Introducción a la lingüística hispánica actual is the ideal introduction to Spanish linguistics for all undergraduate and postgraduate students of Spanish. No prior knowledge of linguistics is assumed as the book takes you step-by-step through all the main subfields of linguistics, both theoretical and applied. Phonology. morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, second language acquisition, history of the Spanish language, dialectology and sociolinguistics are concisely and accurately outlined providing a comprehensive foundation in the field. A comprehensive companion website provides a wealth of additional resources including further exercises to reinforce the material covered in the book, extra examples to clarify the most difficult concepts, extensive audio clips which reproduce the sounds of phonemes and allophones and sonograms. Written in a clear and accessible manner with extensive auxiliary materials, Introducción a la lingüística hispánica actual has been specially designed for students of Spanish with little or no linguistic background who need to understand the key concepts and constructs of Spanish linguistics.

Semiotics has ever-changing vistas in consonance with changes in the ever-increasing complexity of life on Planet Earth. This book presents cutting-edge work in semiotics, projecting developments in the future of the field. Authored by leading semioticians, Semiotics and its Masters, Volume 2 contains essays on learning, transdisciplinarity, science, scaffolding, narrative, selfhood, ecosemiotics, agency, cybersemiotics, pornography, nostalgia, language and money. The volume presents a panorama of semiotics as it will develop in the third decade of the 21st century. This book will furnish the reader with an overview of the challenges that face explorers in the contemporary world of signs.

This book develops Gregory Bateson’s ideas regarding “communication about relationship” in animals and human beings, and even nations. It bases itself on Bateson’s theory of relational communication, as he described it in the zoosemiotics of octopus, mammals, birds, and human beings. This theory includes, for example, the roles of metaphor, play, analog and digital communication, metacommunication, and Laws of Form. It is organized around a letter from Gregory Bateson to his fellow cybernetic thinker Warren McCulloch at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In this letter Bateson argued that what we would today call zoosemiotics, including Bateson’s own (previously unpublished) octopus research, should be made a basis for understanding the relationship between the two blocs of the Cold War. Accordingly the book shows how Bateson understood interactive processes in the biosemiotics of conflict and peacemaking, which are analyzed using examples from recent animal studies, from primate studies, and from cultural anthropology. The Missile Crisis itself is described in terms of Bateson’s critique of game theory which he felt should be modified by an understanding of the zoosemiotics of relational communication. The book also includes a previously unpublished piece by Gregory Bateson on wolf behavior and metaphor/ abduction.