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The vervet monkey conveys meaning in the use of each call to convey to other monkeys that there is a specific predator nearby. Therefore the language is meaningful. Furthermore, the language is referential in that it refers to an event or object in the world. But most importantly, the system is communicative in that it is an interpersonal form of communication directed at other animals. However, one of the most important aspects of human language is the use of structure and creativity in order to communicate in an associative way that allows an individual to understand words and sentence structures that may be new to us. The vervet monkey does not display creativity in it's communication as there is no evidence of each call being incorporated into sentences or words being associated with one another to create similar or new meaning. Similarly, there is no grammatical structure to the vervet monkey's communication, with each word being singular and having no evident prescriptive or descriptive rules governing the language and how it is spoken. Although there have been no concrete examples of animals using grammatical structure in language, it is believed that in line with present research, animals do not use structure-dependant operations when communicating.
As with grammatical structure in language, the ability to use communication to refer to things in the past or a situation or object which is not available at the time, is an ability which seems to be present in human language but not in animals. As communication in animals is usually only utilised in two areas, survival (i.e.food etc) and danger, it would seem logical that animals have no need for this type of communication. This design feature of language is referred to as displacement and refers to the ability to be able to convey things that have happened in the past to others e.g. "yesterday I visited a lovely restaurant".