In their paper, Schlenker et al. (2016b) analyse a wealth of data on monkey alert calls using the tools of formal semantics and pragmatics. Such a pursuit promises to be extremely valuable. By figuring out exactly how such animal communication systems work, we may be able to shed light on evolutionary precursors of human language. While the field is too nascent to say anything concrete on this front, the paper hopes to show the promise of using these methods. In my comments, I want to carefully examine whether the methods are in fact appropriate and what justifies their use. First, I will briefly review scalar implicatures because a similarmechanism plays a critical role in all of their case studies. Then, I will closely look at two of the case studies and raise some questions in each case about the theoretical roles that sentences and compositional interpretation thereof play. Finally, I will conclude with some general worries about the use of competition among alert calls to account for the data at hand.

中文翻译：

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猴子警报电话的组成和竞争

在他们的论文中，Schlenker等人。（2016b）使用形式语义和语用学工具分析了有关猴子警报呼叫的大量数据。这样的追求有望成为极其宝贵的。通过弄清楚这种动物交流系统是如何工作的，我们也许可以阐明人类语言的进化先驱。尽管该领域还处于起步阶段，无法在这方面说什么具体话，但本文希望展示使用这些方法的希望。在我的评论中，我想仔细检查一下这些方法实际上是否合适以及使用它们的合理性。首先，我将简要回顾标量含义，因为相似的机制在所有案例研究中都起着至关重要的作用。然后，我将仔细研究两个案例研究，并在每个案例中提出一些有关句子及其构成解释所起的理论作用的问题。最后，我将以一些一般性的忧虑来结束，这些忧虑是在警报呼叫之间使用竞争来说明手头的数据。