Table of Contents

1. Goals of the Volume—Jeffrey Punske

2. Many Ways to Say Things: What the Diversity of Animal Communication on Earth Can Tell Us About the Likely Nature of Alien Language—Arik Kershenbaum

3. Recognizing Intentional Signals and Their Meaning in Non-Human Communication—Catherine Hobaiter, Adriano R. Lameira, and Derek Ball

4. Getting Out of Our Skin: What Decoding Interspecies Communication and Nonhuman Intelligence Can Tell Us About Deciphering Alien Languages—Denise L. Herzing

5. Communicative Resources Beyond the Verbal Tier: A View on Xenolinguistics from Interactional Linguistics—Heike Ortner

6. How Studies of Communication Among Nonhumans and Between Humans and Nonhumans Can Inform SETI—Irene M. Pepperberg

7. Patterns of Communication of Human Complex Societies as a Blueprint for Alien Communication—Anamaria Berea

8. Interstellar Competence: Applications of Linguistics and Communicative and Cultural Competencies to Extraterrestrial Communication—Sumayya K.R. Granger, Judd Ethan Ruggill, and Ken S. McAllister

9. Why Do We Assume That We Can Decode Alien Languages?—Con Slobodchikoff

10. Xenolinguistic Fieldwork—Claire Bowern

11. Investigating the Foundations of Meaning in a Xenolanguage—Andrew McKenzie

12. A Linguistic Perspective on the Drake Equation: Knowns and Unknowns for Human Languages and Extraterrestrial Communication—Daniel Ross

13. Cognition, Sensory Input, and Linguistics : A Possible Language for Blind Aliens—Sheri Wells-Jensen

14.The Design Features of Extraterrestrial Language: A Domain-General Approach—Darcy Sperlich

15. Universal Grammar—Ian Roberts, Jeffrey Watumull, and Noam Chomsky

16. Where Does Universal Grammar Fit in the Universe? Human Cognition and the Strong Minimalist Thesis—Bridget D. Samuels and Jeffrey Punske

17. Learning and Adaptation of Communication Systems in Biological Life Forms—Jessie S. Nixon and Fabian Tomaschek

18. Writing Systems and METI: Off-the-Shelf Encoding of Human Physiology, Language, Cognition, and Culture—Daniel Harbour

About the Author

Douglas A. Vakoch is Director of METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence), a nonprofit research and educational organization dedicated to transmitting intentional signals to nearby stars. He is the editor of more than a dozen books, including Ecofeminist Science Fiction: International Perspectives on Gender, Ecology, and Literature (2021) and The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature (2022).

Jeffrey Punske is Associate Professor and the director of undergraduate studies in linguistics at Southern Illinois University. He is the editor of Language Invention and Linguistics Pedagogy (2020).