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Communication Without Language How Great Apes May Cover Crucial Advantages of Language Without Creating a System of Symbolic Communication

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Communication Without Language How Great Apes May Cover Crucial Advantages of Language Without Creating a System of Symbolic Communication John Benjamins Publishing Company This is a contribution from Gesture 15:2 © 2016. John Benjamins Publishing Company This electronic file may not be altered in any way. The author(s) of this article is/are permitted to use this PDF file to generate printed copies to be used by way of offprints, for their personal use only. Permission is granted by the publishers to post this file on a closed server which is accessible only to members (students and faculty) of the author’s/s’ institute. It is not permitted to post this PDF on the internet, or to share it on sites such as Mendeley, ResearchGate, Academia.edu. Please see our rights policy on https://benjamins.com/content/customers/rights For any other use of this material prior written permission should be obtained from the publishers or through the Copyright Clearance Center (for USA: www.copyright.com). Please contact [email protected] or consult our website: www.benjamins.com Communication without language How great apes may cover crucial advantages of language without creating a system of symbolic communication Julia Cissewski and Christophe Boesch Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig Great apes do not possess language or any comparable system of symbolic com- munication. Yet they communicate intentionally and possess cognitive competen- cies 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 popula- tion a communicative signal’s meaning is modified without changing its form, resulting in a new ‘vocabulary item’. Second, we propose that great apes, in addi- tion 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. Keywords: great apes, symbolic communication, intentionality, auditory gestures Introduction Human language is a system of intentional communication that plays a crucial role in human social interaction. Its functions include the informing and help- ing of others, the establishment and maintenance of social bonds, and the ma- nipulation of others’ psychological states and resulting behavior (Enfield, 2010). Human language in its spoken, written or signed forms can be defined as a sys- tem of linguistic symbols, and rules that govern their combination and hierarchi- cal structure (morphology, syntax, discourse). Linguistic symbols are based on Gesture 15:2 (2016), 224–249. doi 10.1075/gest.15.2.04cis issn 1568–1475 / e-issn 1569–9773 © John Benjamins Publishing Company Communication without language 225 mental abstractions (which in the following we will refer to as ‘meanings’) that by convention are linked arbitrarily with forms (that is, usually — but not necessar- ily — with sound shapes) within a speech community. Contrary to non-symbolic communication systems, language provides its users with these advantages: (i) the possibility of referential temporal and spatial displacement, that is, the possibility of making reference to objects, events, or ideas etc. that are distant in space and/or time, and (ii) open-endedness, that is, the possibility of creating new symbols and an unlimited number of symbol combinations (e.g., Hockett, 1960). These proper- ties make language an immensely powerful means of communication. Great apes do not possess language or any other comparable system of symbol- ic communication, although they do possess symbolic competencies (see below). They communicate via intentional gestures and vocalizations. Gestures, i.e., goal- directed and mechanically ineffective limb or head movements and body postures directed toward a recipient (Pika & Mitani, 2008), in great apes fall into three sensory modalities: auditory, visual and tactile. They are a means of intentional communication and have been described for great-ape populations in the wild (e.g., Bard, 1992; Genty, Breuer, Hobaiter, & Byrne, 2009; Goodall, 1986; Hobaiter & Byrne, 2014; Jaeggi, van Noordwijk, & van Schaik, 2008; MacKinnon, 1974) as well as in captivity (e.g., Liebal, Pika, & Tomasello, 2006; Pika, Liebal, & Tomasello, 2003; Pika, Liebal, Call, & Tomasello, 2003, 2005; Tomasello, Gust, & Frost, 1989). Gestures are used flexibly and are adjusted to the attentional state of the potential recipient. It is still unclear though whether they are aimed at manipulating just the behavior of conspecifics or their mental state and resulting behavior.1 Compared to gestures, the production and usage of great ape and other non- human primate vocalizations is limited (e.g., Hammerschmidt & Fischer, 2008; Seyfarth & Cheney, 2010), apparently due to neural and socio-cognitive con- straints that influence, for instance, the apes’ ability of vocal imitation (for a com- prehensive review see Fitch, 2005). Moreover, vocalizations until rather recently have been regarded as being tightly connected to emotional states (e.g., see the re- view by Owren, Amoss, & Rendall, 2010). However, there is evidence for the pres- ence of social learning processes in their acquisition, resulting in a certain acous- tic variation of calls between groups (Crockford, Herbinger, Vigilant, & Boesch, 2004). There is also evidence that they can be under volitional control (e.g., Byrne, 1. Note that Moore (forthcoming) argues that great apes (and young children) not only act with communicative intent and perceive the potential recipient as intentional agent, but that they also mark their intentional gestures by an act of ostension (for example, positioning themselves in front of the potential recipient when presenting a body part for grooming), and thus provide the recipient with the possibility of recognition of communicative intent. They thus would be ca- pable of “Gricean communication”, which so far has been attributed exclusively to adult humans as it supposedly requires so-called higher-order meta-representations. © 2016. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved 226 Julia Cissewski and Christophe Boesch 1993, 2010; Hauser, 1990; Watts & Mitani, 2001; Wilson, Hauser, & Wrangham, 2007). Intentional usage of context-specific vocalizations in great apes has been reported as well (e.g., Crockford, Wittig, Mundry, & Zuberbühler, 2012; Schel, Townsend, Machanda, Zuberbühler, & Slocombe, 2013; Slocombe et al., 2010). The level of intentionality in the production and usage of different vocalizations seems to vary, however, and is still debated. Thus, compared to open-ended language, the great apes’ repertoires of inten- tional communicative signals seem to be limited. They are adjusted to the apes’ spe- cific needs of informing, helping and manipulating conspecifics in the areas of, for instance, foraging, mating, predator evasion, and traveling. The apparently stable sets of ecological challenges that great apes are facing do not seem to result in any selective pressures strong enough to enhance language evolution (Boesch, 2012b). However, great apes do possess symbolic competencies. Studies in captive set- tings confirm that great apes not only are able to spontaneously acquire and ap- ply linguistic symbols provided by humans (for example, symbolic gestures based on signs from ASL, or lexigrams). They also show abilities of categorization, that is, the mental grouping of objects, subjects etc. according to specific properties and for specific purposes; they invent new signs for novel objects by combining known signs; they decontextualize signs, that is, they isolate and generalize a men- tal representation from the original context; and they combine signs to form short utterances (e.g., Greenfield & Savage-Rumbaugh, 1990; Miles, 1990; Patterson, 1978; Savage-Rumbaugh, McDonald, Sevcik, Hopkins, & Rubert, 1986). The use of human-provided symbols moreover enables great apes to express spatial and temporal displacement (Call, 2011; Lyn et al., 2014), one of the advantages pro- vided by human language as mentioned above that seems to be absent in great ape natural communication.2 That is, in great apes there must have been a selection for abilities to entertain mental concepts (including concepts of absent objects or individuals and of past or future events, see e.g., Boesch & Boesch, 1984; Janmaat, Ban, & Boesch, 2013; Mulcahy & Call, 2006; Normand, Ban, & Boesch, 2009; Osvath, 2009; Osvath & Osvath, 2008; van Schaik, Damerius, & Isler, 2013). This seems logical, given the complexity of nonhuman primate social systems (e.g., Cheney & Seyfarth, 2007) or the complexity of their material environment (e.g., Milton, 1981; Russon & Begun, 2004). These mental concepts would provide the cognitive basis for the meaning side of linguistic symbols, at least on a rudimentary level. 2. The only candidate for displacement in great ape gestural communication in the wild so far reported is the buttress-drumming observed by Boesch (1991a) in one individual of the Taï chimpanzee community in the travel context. Drumming was used to announce resting periods as well as changes in travel direction. The latter included changes that would not happen before one hour of resting had passed. © 2016. John
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