A Grammar of Italian Sign Language (LIS)

Common nouns describe (classes of) entities, that can be concrete or abstract, like in the following examples: paper and hope, where the first name is concrete, while the second is abstract.

            Common nouns can also be distinguished between countable and non-countable nouns. Countable nouns, such as cat, can combine with numerals (LEXICON 3.10.1) and can be pluralised. On the other end, non-countable nouns, such as sugar, cannot combine with numerals, nor be pluralised.

            In LIS, nouns can be used in a predicative function. LIS, as many other sign languages, does not have copula verbs (SYNTAX 2.1.4.1). In the following example, we can see a construction in which the noun student functions as a nominal predicate.

 

 

 

            brother poss₁ student

            ‘My brother is a student.’

 

It follows that sometimes it can be difficult to understand when a sign is a noun or a verb. This is quite straightforward with signs like student above, which are semantically easy to identify as nouns because they relate to specific object or entities in the world. In other cases, signs are semantically related to other signs. An example is the sign for electricity, which can be used to express the meanings of ‘electricity’ and ‘electric shock’. As in the case of hyperonymy and hyponymy, the distinction of different meanings is realised by mouth actions, as can be seen below.

 

 

 

 

                                  ‘elettricità’

            a.         electricity

            ‘Electricity’

 

 

 

                                           [brrr]

            b.         electricity

            ‘Electric shock’

 

Moreover, the sign electricity is productively used to form the compound electricity^CL(5): ‘type’, meaning ‘computer’.

 

 

 

            electricity^CL(5): ‘type’

            ‘Computer’

 

Other nouns can be recognized because they originate from visual metaphors (LEXICON 1.1). For instance, the articulation of the sign below metaphorically depicts a sharp object trying to penetrate a barrier.

 

            difficulty

 

 

However, common nouns in LIS, as in other sign languages, sometimes are homophonous to verbs, or only slightly different. In these instances, in order to identify the lexical category of the sign, we must consider: i) its syntactic distribution within the sentence; ii) its morphosyntactic properties; iii) its morphophonological features (particularly, movement features, duration of the articulation, or the presence of mouthings or mouth gestures).

            For instance, aspectual or adverbial marking is typical of verbs. In (a), we show the verb fly, marked by lips protrusion (lp) and puffed cheeks (pc) (MORPHOLOGY 2.1.2.1). This one-handed sign can be modified by adding the non-dominant hand and reduplicating the movement component to convey the repetition of the action, as shown in (b).

 

 

 

 

                                pc

                                 lp

            a.         fly

 

 

 

 

                                                                   pc

                                                                    lp

            b.         dom:                fly++

                        n-dom: fly++

            ‘(To) fly several times/frequently.’

 

When functioning as a noun, the same sign can display morphological plural marking, which is typical of nouns. In (a) below we provide the sign plane in its citation form, which can be reduplicated to convey plurality, as shown in (b).

 

 

 

            a.         plane

 

 

 

            b.         dom:                plane++

                        n-dom:plane++

            ‘Airplanes’

 

Moreover, nouns can be distinguished from verbs also considering their morphophonological properties. In the examples below, the noun rocket (a) displays a shorter duration and it is accompanied by the labial articulation of the corresponding Italian word missile. On the other hand, the corresponding verb CL(G): ‘rocket_take_off’ (b) displays a longer duration of the articulation and it occurs with the mouth gestures puffed cheeks (pc) and lips protrusion (lp).

 

 

 

                         ‘missile’

            a.         rocket

 

 

 

                                                                          pc

                                                                           lp

            b.         CL(G): ‘rocket_take_off’

            ‘(To) take off’

 

Alternatively, nouns can be distinguished from verbs by taking into account movement features. In the examples below, we show that the noun drinking_glass (a) displays a shorter and repeated movement with respect to the semantically related classifier predicate (b). For further details on noun-verb differences the reader is referred to MORPHOLOGY 2.1.2.1 and MORPHOLOGY 2.2.4.

 

 

 

            a.         drinking_glass

            ‘Drinking glass’

 

 

 

            b.         CL(unspread curved open 5): ‘drink_from_a_glass’

            ‘(To) drink from a glass’