From Token to Intent: A Holophrastic, Ostensive-Inferential Framework for Augmentative Interspecies Communication in Domestic Dogs

Augmentative Interspecies Communication (AIC) via recordable-button soundboards has emerged in the past five years as one of the most active domains of comparative-cognition research, with the UCSD Comparative Cognition Lab now coordinating a citizen-science cohort exceeding ten thousand participating dogs and producing the field's first peer-reviewed empirical findings. Within that landscape, almost all attention — public and academic — has been directed at vocabulary expansion (20 to 150 buttons per dog) and at apparent compositional sequence production. The present paper articulates and defends an alternative methodological position. We argue that an intentionally minimal, eleven-token soundboard, paired with explicit human verbal-sentence scaffolding and an ostensive-inferential interpretive frame, is not a downscaled version of the standard board but a different methodological object: an intentional-pragmatic interface in which the dog's press is the ostensive signal, the surrounding context is the inferential field, and the human interlocutor's contextual interpretation is a methodological feature rather than a confound. We present this position alongside pilot observations from the CCR / Haverim home laboratory in Walloon Brabant, Belgium, on a single-household cohort of four dogs: Pretty (English Springer Spaniel, 9 y, primary subject); Lilly (wire-haired dwarf dachshund, ~10 y); Elvis (long-coated chihuahua, senior); and the visiting dog Otao. Observations are reported as field notes within an explicit press typology (requestive, referential, affective, regulatory, exploratory, accidental) and accompanied by a structured account of negative observations — tokens never used, false positives, ambiguous presses — included in deliberate response to recurrent reviewer concerns about cherry-picking. The paper develops three theoretical contributions: (i) a holophrastic-pragmatic frame for canine AIC, drawing on Halliday's developmental linguistics and Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory; (ii) a typology of canine button productions; (iii) an explicit comparative architecture against the UCSD large-vocabulary, combinatorial protocol. The paper closes with a pre-registered analysis plan for multi-household replication (target n ≥ 10 dogs across ≥ 5 households), including specific hypotheses with directional predictions, a planned analysis pipeline (chi-square contingency on token–context association; Cohen's kappa for inter-rater reliability; mixed-effects models for cross-dog generalisation), an a-priori power analysis, and an inter-rater coding rubric. The article is offered as a preprint base for deposition on Zenodo and OSF, as a Stage-1 candidate for Registered Report submission, and as an open invitation to the comparative-cognition community.