The search for universal primate gestural meanings
Pritty Patel-Grosz
June 2023 

This paper pursues the idea that human and non-human great apes share a common set of directive (imperative) gestures and their meanings. We investigate gestures that are multifunctional, in that they have different effects in different contexts, focusing on non-human ape gestures that communicate “Stop that” in some contexts, and “Move away” in others. What may superficially appear to be lexical ambiguity can be derived from a single abstract lexical entry, “Not X!”, concluded to be a candidate for a universal building block of meaning, shared by human and non-human great apes, reflections of which may also be found in the pragmatic gestures in humans.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007212 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	to appear in the proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 27
keywords:	gesture semantics; directive imperative gestures; ape gestures; super linguistics; semantic universals, semantics
previous versions:	v1 [March 2023]
Downloaded:	698 times

 

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