A Living Database of Conative Animal Calls

Version 1.1

Alexander Andrason, Anna Luisa Daigneault, Maya Hendrix, Rebecca Pizzitola & Anusha Somu

Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages

Salem, Oregon

2024
A Living Database of Conative Animal Calls

© Alexander Andrason
© Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages

Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages

Salem, Oregon
2024

DOI https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12724966

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
1. Introduction

The present Living Database captures the evidence related to Conative Animal Calls, or CACs.
CACs are:

(a) lexicalized constructions (i.e., they constitute a word-like form-meaning pairing)

(b) bestowed with phonic substance (this phonic substance may be produced orally, with
body parts other than the mouth and vocal tract, or by manipulating objects)
(c) that are (exclusively, primarily, or regularly) addressed to non-human animal species,
(d) entertain a directive function (i.e., the human speaker requests or orders their animal
interlocutor to perform a determined action or behave in a certain way),
(e) and apart from functioning as words or word-like construction (see (a) above), can be
used holophrastically as self-standing and non-elliptical utterances (Andrason &
Matutu, under review, p. 3)

The Living Database of Conative Animal Calls systematizes four years of research activities
dedicated to these types of constructions. The research was mostly carried out within the project
KI-AFRIKA1 at the Living Tongues Institute of Endangered Languages. Because our own research
focuses on Africa, the database contains many examples of CACs from the languages of Africa.
However, it includes published evidence of CACs from other continents as well. As far as we
know, it is the largest and most comprehensive database of CACs that is currently available to
scholars and researchers.

2. Compiling the database

The work on the database was carried out in 2024 within the framework of a four-week internship
program offered by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, a non-profit research
organization based in Salem, Oregon, USA. Three international students participated in the
program remotely: Maya Hendrix, Rebecca J. Pizzitola, and Anusha Somu. They were supervised
and mentored by Dr. Alexander Andrason (research coordinator for Africa at the Living Tongues
Institute for Endangered Languages, and research fellow at the Center for African Studies at the
University of Cape Town) and Anna Luisa Daigneault, M.Sc (program director at the Living
Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, and doctoral candidate at Université de Montréal).
Apart from processing, editing, and organizing the data in the database, the students were
introduced to the scholarship of CACs and became familiarized with the pragmatics, semantics,
phonetics, morphology, and syntax of this category, as well as its ecolinguistic properties. The
interns were provided with the handouts prepared by the mentors as well as the most relevant
scholarly articles in the field, the content of which was carefully discussed during online meetings.

1
Information about the KI-AFRIKA project can be accessed on this web page: https://livingtongues.org/ki-afrika/

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The mentors designed a database grid and developed a plan for its population. The whole team met
online once a week over Zoom, but conversed daily on Slack, the communication platform used
by researchers at the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. In most cases, our team’s
interactions were nearly synchronous; issues and questions would be addressed within a few
minutes through online communication. This allowed us to complete our respective tasks promptly
and advance our work according to the internship schedule.

Figure 1: A screenshot taken during one of our online meetings.

Our work was divided into four phases. During the first phase, we extracted CACs from the
previous linguistic documentation projects conducted within the KI-AFRIKA research program. This
includes articles that have already been published or submitted for publication, papers that are in
press or still in progress, as well as the results of some projects that remain in the data collection
stage. The languages in this phase consisted of Arusa Maasai, Asante, Babanki, Bono, Bum,
Chinyugwe, Dogon (Teŋukan), Ewe, Fante, Gorwaa, Kihunde, Latvian, Macha Oromo, Mpokwe,
Oroko, Polish, Sengwer, Somali, Tjwao, Xhosa, and Yoruba. We also incorporated data from three
crosslinguistic databases compiled within the KI-AFRIKA research program: those containing CACs
directed to cats, donkey, and poultry. Additionally, we extracted CACs from two crosslinguistic
articles developed within KI-AFRIKA: one dedicated to dispersals (Andrason 2023) and the other
devoted to so-called conative kisses (Andrason 2024). These studies drew on 79 and 50 languages,
respectively. The second phase of database building consisted of extracting CACs from works
published outside of the KI-AFRIKA research program that were either devoted to CACs or (more
or less) substantially mentioned these types of constructions in specific languages: Arabic (Abdulla
& Nasir Talib 2009), Ewe (Ameka 1992), Chuvash (Denisova & Sergeev 2015), Kambaata (Treis

2
2023), Konso (Ongaye Oda Orkaydo 2013), Lithuanian (Ambrazas et al. 2006), Matses (Fleck
2003), Noon (Soukka 1999), Maale, Wolaitta, and Zargulla (Amha 2013), Tamazight Ait Hadiddu
and other Berber varieties (Bynon 1976), as well as a number of Slavonic languages, e.g., Polish,
Serbia, Croatian, Czech, Slovak, Sorbian, and Russian (Siatkowska 1976; Wierzbicka 2003;
Daković 2006). In the third phase, we extracted CACs from existing crosslinguistic studies (e.g.,
Bolton 1897 and Heine 2023). In the fourth phrase, we refined the database contents and
formatting, corrected errors, and enhanced consistency across data fields. Each phase lasted one
week, and the whole process lasted a month.

Subsequently, the database was revised by the mentors, especially with regard to the uniformity of
text/labels used in each column. We paid special attention to verify all language codes and
determine the sources of data points. After this, the spreadsheet was shared with the directors of
Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages and the managing team for final edits and
proofing.

3. Structure of the database

The database contains 1520 entries from 140 languages. The first four columns are classificatory
and list respective languages, their ISO 639-3 codes and Glottocodes, as well as our internal
database (corpus) tags. Two subsequent columns contain orthographic lemma and transcriptions
in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). In some studies, from which we extracted CACs, the
IPA forms were employed instead of orthographic lemmas, either because the orthography of that
language had not been developed yet, was in the process of crystallization, or it was simply
impossible to codify the representation of certain CACs within the standard orthography that
already existed. In those cases, our database re-used these same IPA forms as lemmas as well.
Inversely, for several CACs, no IPA transcriptions are provided because these forms were absent
in the original sources. The next three columns refer to semantics and provide the description of
the meaning of each CAC; specifically, its animal addressee and the action requested or intended.
Next, the actions associated with the collected lexemes are categorized into four main types as is
typical of studies on CACs: summonses (which are used to call animals to come), dispersals (used
to chase away animals and/or repel them), directionals (used to modify the movement of an animal
in all possible ways), and others, i.e., actions generally unrelated to motion (e.g., silencing an
animal). After this, the database specifies the sources of CACs. If the source is not provided, the
example comes from our own data-collection activities. Lastly, the database provides some
supplementary information in the ‘notes’ column.

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Below, we present all the parameters/tags as they appear in the database:

directional
glottocode
ISO 639-3

addressee

summons
language

dispersal
meaning
lemma

source
action

notes
other
IPA
tag

The spreadsheet containing the database has been embedded in this PDF as an attachment:

Our database has unavoidable limitations, the most important of which stem from the fact that not
all the works mentioning CACs have been incorporated. The most significant absentees are the
book dedicated to CACs in West Slavonic authored by Siatkowska (1976) and the study of CACs
in Finnish authored by Jääskeläinen (2021). The languages of these publications – Finnish and
Polish – prevented our students from successfully extracting and categorizing CACs. (However,
Siatkowska’s data have, to some extent, been incorporated as several CACs had previously
featured in other studies published within the KI-AFRIKA research program.) We were also forced
to disregard a few books and articles published in the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th
century. All these works will be included in the future versions of the database.

We kindly encourage the users of the Living Database of Conative Animal Calls to alert us of any
inconsistencies and/or errors. We also invite our readers to further expand this database by
providing data they may have access to or suggest sources from which these could be extracted.

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