<p>In this theoretical paper, animal communicational acts are investigated as part of a larger project meta-studying aspects comprising animal utterances, their form, content, act, time, and space. It explains how pragmatics historically merged with syntax and semantics, extending scopes from language toward communication, semiotics, and multimodality, and hence from sentences to levels of genre, discourse, and context. Within biosemiotics these shifts boosted interest in phenomena such as sign, mind, meaning, and agency as biological and semiotic research targets, challenging epistemologies and methodologies in biology. Discussions on pragmatics are further related to an outlined socio-semiotic framework (FW) that interrelates a set of key communicational elements. It combines the five mentioned aspects with the four levels sign, utterance, life-genre, and lifeworld as well as involved processes such as semiosis and positioning. The FW is finally (self-)critically evaluated in a methodological perspective, discussing its relevance and appropriateness as a tool for studying the pragmatics of animal communication. It is concluded that it is relevant for operationalisation when studying animal acts in a semiotic perspective. Its strength is a systemic and broad perspective, while a specific challenge will be its ability to support more detailed analyses. It is hence concluded that the next step should be small-scaled meta-studies of animal acts. Their foci should be how act as an aspect of utterance relates to concrete micro sign elements on the one hand and to life-genre as a macro-concept on the other, exploring benefits and challenges that communicational systemness as perspective may create.</p>