The Challenge of Positioning Space and Time in Systemic Studies of Animal Utterances as Both Embodied and External Contexts

Abstract

Animal utterances are metastudied based on a framework describing relations between aspects of utterance, genre, and lifeworld, form, content, act, time, and space. The study concerns a set of problems: How is context perceived theoretically and empirically? Where are time and space positioned? Is time and space studied separately or as chronotope, as spacetime, as a whole? What does embodied context mean? What are syste- mic studies? Of the studies two focus on systemic projects, two on complexity and contextual variations, two on time and space as separate phenomena, and three on spacetime. Since aspects such as signs, utterances, and genres evolved before language, they presumably constituted animals’ communicational system, working as a resource for communication even for all species, hominids and humans included. Studying such elements challenges how we conceive how they interrelate, especially in spacetime. The study revealed that spacetime was mostly positioned outside utterances and only occasionally as embodied. Integration of all key elements was not found in the excerpt.