RT Journal Article
SR Electronic(1)
A1 Cissewski, Julia
A1 Boesch, Christophe
YR 2016
T1 Communication without language: How great apes may cover crucial advantages of language without creating a system of symbolic communication
JF Gesture
VO 15
IS 2
SP 224
OP 249
DO https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.15.2.04cis
PB John Benjamins
SN 1568-1475,
AB Great apes do not possess language or any comparable system of symbolic communication. Yet they communicate intentionally and possess cognitive competencies like categorization and decontextualization. These provide the basis for mental concepts and the meaning side of linguistic symbols. The arbitrarily linked and conventionalized forms for expressing these meanings, however, seem to be largely missing. We propose two strategies that may allow great apes to communicate a wide array of meanings without creating numerous arbitrarily linked forms. First, we suggest the existence of ‘population-specific semantic shifts’: within a population a communicative signal’s meaning is modified without changing its form, resulting in a new ‘vocabulary item’. Second, we propose that great apes, in addition to possessing sophisticated inferential abilities, intentionally display behaviors without overt communicative intent to provide eavesdropping conspecifics with ‘natural meaning’ (in the Gricean sense) and thus to influence their behavior.,
UL https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/gest.15.2.04cis