A Grammar of Italian Sign Language (LIS)

The borrowed gestures that have entered the LIS lexicon as lexical items can belong to different lexical categories. To illustrate, the examples below show the noun hunger (a), the verb care_not (b), and the adjective delicious (c).

            a.         hunger

            b.         care_not

            ‘Don’t care’    

            c.         delicious

Being originated from gestures, these three signs are fully recognizable by Italian non-signers as well. Crucially, as signs, they are integrated in the LIS structure and are used compositionally (i.e. their meaning contributes to the interpretation of the sentence).

            As a final note, there are quite a few LIS signs derived from a universal gesture, namely the deictic pointing gesture. This is used on a worldwide scale to refer to contextually relevant entities, and it is one of the main gestures produced by babies. Some of these deictic pointing gestures, especially those referring to body parts, have become so conventionalized in signing interactions as to enter the LIS lexicon. For example, signs originated from pointing gestures are eye (pointing to eye) and red (pointing to lips).

            a.         eye

            b.         red