I speculate (thus incurring Miles' wrath) that one issue muddying the waters may be a confusion between language conceived as a system with grammar and syntax (which is as far as we know unique to humans* and therefore with which we are obsessed and part of our general desire to wank our own species) and language conceived as just a system-of-signs-that-convey meaning (which many many animals have). I don't see any particular reason why you couldn't consider language as a subset of animal communication -- which, after all, it is -- and study the features it shares with other such systems. (Of course you still have the problem of systems of signs not leaving fossils.)
Which kind of leads me somewhere -- is it actually necessary for a sophisticated system of communication to have grammar and syntax? Do these things really matter, or is it just more of our human wank, sort of how we're all ga-ga over opposable thumbs? Do such notions even apply to e.g. communications systems based on colors or smells?
Groundless speculation now ends here.
*insert necessary caveat about ape language acquisition here
Christopher E. Doss Moscow, Russian Federation
--- On Wed, 6/10/09, Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote:
> From: Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com>
> Subject: [lbo-talk] Kenneally, some notes and background
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Wednesday, June 10, 2009, 4:33 AM
>
> I've been reading Christine Kenneally's _The First Word:
> The Search
> for the Origins of Language_ which is an overview to the
> debates in
> the field.... shag
>
> ----------
>