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.

中文翻译：

---

无语言交流

类人猿没有语言或任何类似的符号交流系统。然而，他们有意识地进行交流，并拥有分类和去语境等认知能力。这些为心理概念和语言符号的意义方面提供了基础。然而，用于表达这些含义的任意链接和约定俗成的形式似乎在很大程度上缺失了。我们提出了两种策略，可以让类人猿传达广泛的含义，而不会创建许多任意链接的形式。首先，我们建议存在“特定人群语义转变”：在一个人群中，交流信号的含义被修改而不改变其形式，从而产生一个新的“词汇项目”。其次，我们提出类人猿，除了拥有复杂的推理能力，