ABSTRACT
Animal signals come from a report in The Times on the work of Seyfarth and his colleagues on the 'alarm' calls of the vervet monkey. The 'apartheid' thesis is that human communication and animal communication are equally valid, but separate; or at least must be treated as separate under any respectably 'scientific' approach. Primatologists provides an object lesson as to how the argument about the meaning of primate signals is likely to go if anyone insists on squeezing it into the Procrustean bed borrowed from linguistics. The semantics of motor-horn signalling is not amenable to any informative analysis on a simple type-token basis. It allows too much scope for individual variation and is too highly context-dependent. The mosquito-repellent advertisement is an interesting example precisely because the text of this advertisement itself gives the lie to the latter claim quite directly.
