Abstract
We and our colleagues have been doing studies of great ape gestural communication for more than 30 years. Here we attempt to spell out what we have learned. Some aspects of the process have been reliably established by multiple researchers, for example, its intentional structure and its sensitivity to the attentional state of the recipient. Other aspects are more controversial. We argue here that it is a mistake to assimilate great ape gestures to the species-typical displays of other mammals by claiming that they are fixed action patterns, as there are many differences, including the use of attention-getters. It is also a mistake, we argue, to assimilate great ape gestures to human gestures by claiming that they are used referentially and declaratively in a human-like manner, as apes’ “pointing” gesture has many limitations and they do not gesture iconically. Great ape gestures constitute a unique form of primate communication with their own unique qualities.
Highlights
There are two broad perspectives from which human languages may be viewed
Human languages may be viewed as conventionalized forms of social action in which communicative agents attempt to influence one another’s psychological states in various ways
It is in this context, in the 1980s, that we began our studies of great ape gestural communication
Summary
They were somewhat analogous to reports of great apes doing such things as hiding a fear grimace or play face with their hands (e.g., Tanner and Byrne 1993), or male chimpanzees in the wild stripping dried leaves from their stem loudly in order to get females’ attention to their sexual arousal (leaf-clipping; Nishida 1980) In this case, the “meaning” of the gesture derived from the species-typical display, and the attentiongetters, as we called these signals, were aimed at getting the recipient to attend to the display so that she could respond to it. Clearly much great ape communication occurs via relatively inflexible species-typical displays, as in the many other species studied by ethologists Many of these were originally the initiating action of a meaningful social act, which became phylogenetically ritualized, as the ethologists have documented. It might even differ for different individuals within a species. Halina et al (2013) speculate in this case that when individuals face uncooperative partners, who do not respond as desired to social actions, they might face special social pressure to gesture and to produce it insistently
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