Here we appear to see a male rainbow lorikeet in regulatory mode. The intimidatory protolanguage of the male usually includes very loud, harsh, insistent, iterated squawks, backed up by pupil dilation, a mean confident facial expression with the head tilted forward and raised at the back, wing-flaps promising immediate attack, and standing on tippy-toes to make themselves look bigger — not unlike some aspects of the Maori haka, in fact.
However, what we may actually be seeing here is a male demonstrating to a prospective partner the sort of regulatory gestures that indicate that he would make ‘an ideal husband’ in a society built on bullying. Complex songs (that indicate prodigious sequential memory abilities) don’t win lorikeet hearts.
Well, up to this point, we’ve used SFL theory to model how semiosis emerges from the material order and mediates sociality. Let’s ratchet up the ‘boldly exploring’ factor a notch and look now at how this was preceded by the same basic processes and relations operating at a smaller scale.