Abstract
This article is the second half of the research paper that deals with the phenomenon of coordination in Japanese Sign Language (JSL). The main aim of this article is to report a previously undescribed type of list buoys (Liddell 2003) in JSL and discuss its consequence for the theory of grammaticalization of gestures. In addition to the standard type of list buoys (S-LB) that involve fingers of the weak hand extended horizontally to the side, JSL has another type of list buoys in which the fingers of the weak hand are oriented inward and folded one by one, referred to in this paper as “inward list buoys (I-LB).” Interestingly, an I LB resembles a counting gesture (CG) that is used by hearing speakers of spoken Japanese in their speech when they are listing sets of entities. The question thus arises: what is the nature of an I-LB? To investigate the distribution of the two types of list buoys, S-LB and I-LB,and a CG, we conducted the experiments with native speakers of JSL and Japanese. Based on the results, it is shown in this article that an I-LB is not a gesture but a fully grammaticalized linguistic element. Crucial differences between an I-LB and a CG are the followings: (i) While JSL signers use all fingers when they use I-LBs, hearing speakers, in their co-speech gesture, may only partially use their fingers in their listing; (ii) The consistent insertion of pointing with the dominant hand is observed in the use of I-LBs, but not in the co-speech gesture; and (iii) An I-LB is used only in unordered listing, while a co-speech CG is used in both ordered and unordered listing. It is suggested that these three differences come from essential properties of human language only observed with I-LBs: discreteness, a structural hierarchy, and one-to-one form-function mapping. This discussion therefore defends the recent view that linguistic forms (both sign and spoken language) and gestural forms can be distinguished (see Goldin-Meadow & Brentari 2017).
