A Grammar of Italian Sign Language (LIS)

Cliticisation consists in the fusion of two words in a syntactic string. As a consequence of this phenomenon, coalescence can be observed (PHONOLOGY 3.1.2).

            Differently from cliticisation, compounding is a word formation process that combines two stems (MORPHOLOGY 1). An example of compound in LIS is the sign for parents (father^mother), which combines the stems father and mother.

            a.         father

            (Geraci, 2009: 29) 

            b.         mother

            (Geraci, 2009: 29)

            c.         father^mother

            ‘Parents’ (Geraci, 2009: 29)

Note that in some regions of Italy other variants of these signs may be used. If we compare the compound father^mother with the citation form of its two stems, we can observe some phonological differences. On the one hand, the signs father (a) and mother (b) exhibit a repeated path movement resulting in disyllabic signs. On the other hand, the two members of the compound (c) both lose their inherent repetition. As a result of compounding, deletion of phonological material is thus observed. This usually has an effect on duration in that the compound form tends to be shorter than the two input signs stringed together in a phrase. Another phonological effect of compounding is that the transitional movement from the handshape of the first stem to that of the second stem is reanalysed as the main movement of the compound. For more details about the characteristics of compounds in LIS, the reader is referred to the relevant sections in the Morphology part (MORPHOLOGY 1).