ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the writings of the horse trainer Monty Roberts on body language and communication among horses and between horses and humans through the writings of Talbot J. Taylor on the role of metalanguage in the child’s acquisition of language and his studies of Susan Savage-Rumbaugh’s efforts to teach English to bonobos. These two authors have both come to understand that reflexivity, normativity, freedom, trust, and responsibility are prerequisites for the practices of language and communication. Without this social-moral foundation for all those involved, no linguistic practices could ever begin, for language is necessarily a pas de deux rather than a matter of biological machinery, that deus ex machina (or pas de dieu) of contemporary linguistics.
