A Grammar of Italian Sign Language (LIS)

Personal pronouns encode the person feature, and hence distinguish between different participant roles in the discourse, such as signer, addressee, and non-addressed participant.

            The signer (i.e. first person) is typically referred to by heading the pointing sign realised with ipsilateral palm orientation toward the centre of the chest. Differently from other personal pronouns, first-person pronouns have a constant and stable form, which does not vary according from context to context.

              
            ix₁

The addressee (i.e. second person) is typically referred to by pointing toward the locus associated with the addressee. The articulation of this pronoun displays palm sideways orientation and requires the alignment of the pointing sign and the eye-gaze: both elements must point toward the same direction. Note that second-person pronoun does not point toward a fixed direction, rather it depends on the absolute position of the addressee, who is not necessarily in front of the signer, but could be in different positions as well.

            ix₂

A non-addressed participant (i.e. third person) is typically referred to by pointing toward a locus different from that of the signer and the addressee. Again, this direction is not fixed, rather it depends on the absolute position of the referent (if present in the extra-linguistic context) or the locus associated to the referent in previous discourse. Generally speaking, third-person pronouns are realised with the palm facing sideways and do not display alignment of pointing sign and eye-gaze. This misalignment is shown below.

            ix₃

However, in deictic uses, signers might sometimes direct a quick eye-gaze toward the present referent, especially in those contexts in which identification is particularly challenging.

              eg      

            ix₃