Ricerc@Sapienza

After an initial interest in a zoosemiotic perspective, European semiotics focused exclusively on human language, relegating the communicative performances of non-human animal species below the "semiotic threshold" (Eco 1975). However, ethological research in recent decades has made enormous progress that has shown the sophistication of the communication codes of many species (firstly primates and apes, but also dolphins, crows and other species phylogenetically distant from Homo sapiens) . Unfortunately, the collaboration of semiotics has been lacking in these studies, and this has often produced negative consequences for their interpretation from a theoretical point of view. The article provides an overview of the most current research topics, illustrating case by case the contribution that could come to ethology from a renewed cognitive semiotics, willing to reconsider its object of study.