Pragmatic Challenges in Studies of Animal Acts. Interpreting Zoo-Communication from a Systemic Socio-Semiotic Perspective

Abstract Animals’ communicational acts are meta-studied based on a framework interrelating five aspects form, content, act, time, and space in a systemic perspective. Aspects relate to levels , sign, utterance, life-genre, and lifeworld and to processes . Six studies are investigated, positioning act as part of a web of communicational elements aiming at illustrating the pragmatic role act and life-genre play in sustaining animal life-functions. Re-interpretations of studies of signals, calls, and gestures further aim at enhancing the framework epistemologically and methodologically for the study of zoo-communicational pragmatics. It is suggested that since act tends to be treated as a limited category the field could benefit from a systemic perspective, one that allows balancing open-and closedness on all levels and between all aspects. Studies of great apes’ gestures are studied in particular, focusing which epistemic position acts have when communication is seen as systemic. The paper concludes that a socio-semiotic, systemic, and pragmatic framework can play a constructive role when designing and validating research on zoo-communicational acts.