Animali che giocano, animali che significano. Sulla soglia della semiosi animale

The relationship between humans and animals has frequently been conceptualized in a dualistic manner, characterized by a division that positions the former within a narrative of plenitude and originality, while the latter is situated within the domain of marginality and deficiency. The paper examines play as a privileged ethological site for interrogating the relationship between humans and non-human animals from a philosophy of language, linguistic and semiotic perspective. Western thought has often conceptualized this relationship in dualistic terms, assigning to humans the fullness of mind and language and relegating animals to a condition of marginality and lack (from Aristotle and Descartes to several twentieth-century accounts). The article instead raises the question of the semiotic threshold and of animal subjectivity by drawing on the paradigm of Cognitive Semiotics (Sonesson 2015; Zlatev 2015; Konderak 2018), which proposes a unified theory of meaning-making that moves beyond a sign-centric understanding of semiosis. Taking play behavior as an exemplary ethological case of meta-communicative use of signals (Allen, Bekoff 1997; Burghardt 2005; 2012) shows how non-human animals construct shared meanings and use it a free and variable manner.