Conative “kisses” in human-to-animal communication

Abstract The present article offers the first systematic scholarly analysis of ConKisses, i.e., a sub-class of conative animal calls (i.e., directives addressed to animals) that draw on speech kisses (i.e., sounds that are made with a kiss-like articulatory mechanism). The author examines the pragma-semantics, phonetics, and morphology of ConKisses in 50 languages within a prototype-driven approach to categorization and concludes the following: ConKisses comply with the features associated with the prototype of a conative animal call and may therefore be regarded as the prototype’s canonical instantiations – in fact, they constitute the most canonical subset within the entire conative-animal-call category and thus a highly extra-systematic one from sentence-grammar’s perspective.