The ontogeny and phylogeny of non-verbal deixis

This chapter reviews evidence for deixis in great apes. Some of this evidence suggests that great apes easily develop deictic repertoires in the complete absence of any explicit attempt to train them. It is argued that deixis - in the sense of the ability to direct the attention of another to a specific locus - is a capacity shared by great apes and humans. Assuming that deixis in great apes cannot ultimately derive from bipedalism or other adaptations, our hominin ancestors were pre-adapted for joint attention, which makes deixis a component of the faculty of language in the broad sense of Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch (2002).