抄録
The grammar of intermediate type of Japanese Sign Language (JSL) has not been clearly defined yet. This paper describes several findings about JSL grammatical and semantic rules concerning manual deictic on pointing, and deictic eye movements based upon a corpus of JSL sentences. The corpus is contained in a sign language-oriented database and is composed of video images of 153 JSL sentences taken from signed TV news, sign labels, spoken Japanese sentences corresponding to the images, sign labels and Japanese expressions intermediate between the spoken Japanese and the JSL sentences. The pointing has three grammatical functions; (1) showing relation among words, (2) serving as a pronoun or a demonstrative and (3) defining sign spaces. On the other hand, deictic eye movement has rather semantic functions; (1) serving as an element of word, (2) specifying sign spaces or objects and (3) emphasizing a word. Generally, in sign language pointing, which is classified into the illustrator in the sense of Ekman in face-to-face verbal communication, plays an important syntactic role and in contrast with it functions of eye movement seems to shift to the illustrator.
