LingLunch : Pritty Patel-Grosz

Pritty Patel-Grosz (University of Oslo)
Recent advances in primate semantics: great ape gestural meanings

We explore the question of whether a set of gestural meanings in humans can be traced to a potentially universal gestural inventory shared throughout the family of great apes (humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans). We carried out an exploratory experiment (n=300) in which we tested whether human participants would infer the same meanings that are attested in chimpanzees. Our experiment is complemented by a formal semantic implementation that aims to detect core meaning atoms on the basis of which more concrete gestural meanings are derived in context.