Biosemiotics Achievement Award for the Year 2018

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Biosemiotics Achievement Award for the Year 2018 Maurita Harney 1 & Riin Magnus 2 Received: 15 March 2019 / Accepted: 25 March 2019 / Published online: 2 April 2019 # Springer Nature B.V. 2019

Abstract Established at the annual meeting of the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies (ISBS) on July3rd 2014, in conjunction with Springer Publishing, publishers of the Society’s official journal, Biosemiotics,the Annual Biosemiotic Achievement Award seeks to recognize those papers published in the journal thatpresent novel and potentially important contributions to the ongoing project of biosemiotic research, itsscientific impact, and its future prospects. Here the winner of the Biosemiotics Achievement Award for 2018is announced: the award goes to Mirko Cerrone for his article ‘Umwelt and Ape Language Experiments: onthe Role of Iconicity in the Human-Ape Pidgin Language’. Keywords Biosemiotics achievement award

We are pleased to announce that the Annual Biosemiotic Achievement Award goes to Mirko Cerrone for his article ‘Umwelt and Ape Language Experiments: on the Role of Iconicity in the Human-Ape Pidgin Language’ (Biosemiotics 2018, Vol 11, Issue 1, pages 41–63). Established at the annual meeting of the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies (ISBS) on July 3rd 2014, in conjunction with Springer Publishing, publishers of the Society’s official journal, Biosemiotics, the Annual Biosemiotic Achievement Award seeks to recognize those papers published in the journal that present novel and potentially important contributions to the ongoing project of biosemiotic research, its scientific impact and its future prospects (as detailed at http://www.biosemiotics. org/statutes_of_the_annual_biosemiotic_achievement_award.pdf).

* Maurita Harney [email protected] Riin Magnus [email protected]

1

School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria 3010, Australia

2

Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu, Jakobi 2, Tartu, Estonia

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Harney M., Magnus R.

Mirko Cerrone engages with an area of inquiry that is very complex and of great contemporary relevance both for zoosemiotics and for animal communication studies more broadly. The paper is impressive for its theoretical depth and richness, and for its originality. The author undertakes a careful examination of ape-language experiments involving the teaching of language to apes and including human ape-pidgin. Discussions about the ape language experiments once gave an impetus to the development of zoosemiotics (Umiker-Sebeok and Sebeok 1980; Umiker-Sebeok and Sebeok 1981, c.f. also Maran 2010). The initial critique of Thomas Sebeok concerning the ape language experiments addressed the possibility of the Clever Hans effect involved in the experiments (Umiker-Sebeok and Sebeok 1981). However, Cerrone’s research as well as recent growing evidence about multimodal origins of language (GillespieLynch et al. 2014; Fröhlich and van Schaik 2018) indicate that tables have turned and the presence of gestural or other bo