#metapragmatics

Robin Queen’s excellent Lingstitute talk about the linguistics of sheepdog handler whistles has gotten picked up by Wired. Excerpt: 

The lexicon—the “words” available for use—is small (maybe a dozen commands). But, Queen says, the whistles have what are called sign relations. They can be symbolic, where the sound doesn't have any connection to its meaning. But they can also be iconic (where you can sort of tell what they mean from their form). And even more language-like, they can also be indexical, where the meaning changes depending on how you use them. But here’s the really cool part: Shepherds vary the whistles’ rhythms, pitches, speed, and volume, and "each of those variations provides different kinds of information about what the dog should do,” Queen says. That’s called “prosody,” and it’s a key part of human language.

Just as you might speak more loudly and clearly if you think someone doesn’t understand you, a shepherd will more clearly and slowly blow a command if the dog seems to hesitate. Higher pitches attract attention. A faster whistle tells the dog to speed up, even if they haven’t been trained to do it. (That’s “iconic meaning.”)

When commands have to come faster or more urgently, handlers simplify and remove the parts of the shared language that they don’t need. Queen says this is an example of “metapragmatics,” or speakers understanding how to use their speech. This communication system has none of the “who’s-a-good-dog-yes-you-are” cooing that you might hear between a dog owner and its pet. “Shepherds don’t think of their dogs as little furry people. They understand them as dogs,” Queen says. “It’s this really interesting question of, how do you communicate with a species that doesn’t share your communication system, that doesn’t share your kind of mind?” The answer, roughly, is that anything that might convey whether the handler thinks the dog is doing well or poorly gets cut. “Those parts of language that the dog can’t understand—because it’s not a human—come out.”