A Grammar of Italian Sign Language (LIS)

Across languages, agentive markers are employed to derive agentive nouns from verbs or other non-agentive nouns. In LIS, agentive nouns are often distinguished from the corresponding verb by means of simultaneous derivation involving the modification of phonological features (explored in MORPHOLOGY 2.1.2.1). As for agentive nouns derived from other non-agentive nouns, instead, LIS can employ the sign person, functioning asagentive marker. Consider the pair below.

 

 

 

         a.            car

        

 

 

                                 ‘autista’

         b.            car^person

         ‘Driver’

 

In the examples above, we notice some important features: i) the sign person in (b) follows the sign car, which is phonologically reduced in movement; ii) the mouthing (PHONOLOGY 1.5.2) of the Italian word autista (‘driver’) spreads on both the signs car and person; iii) the signs car and person form a lexical unit. In so doing the sign person could either be considered a derivational morpheme deriving an agentive noun from a non-agentive noun, or it could be considered the second member of the compound car^person since it is a sign that can also occur alone (MORPHOLOGY 1). Accounting for the morphological nature of person is not straightforward because its articulation is not systematic and not obligatory among signers. As shown in the example below, the sign person is not produced after the sign car, it is only the mouthing autista (‘driver’) that allows to identify the agentive noun.

 

 

 

            ‘autista’        

         car      ix₃ drive phone speak

         ‘The driver talks on the phone while driving.’

 

Mouthings are also crucial in cases of homophonicity between the sign for the agentive noun and the verb (further details are discussed in MORPHOLOGY 2.2.4). In the example below, the two signs are distinguished by the mouthings of the corresponding Italian words, ballerina (‘dancer’) and balla (‘dances’) and are articulated in two different points of the signing space.

 

 

 

         ‘ballerina’  ‘balla’

         dancer dance

         ‘The dancer is dancing.’

 

Therefore, it seems that LIS can rely on several means to mark agentivity and does not necessarily need a dedicated element. What is crucial is that person is necessary to convey plurality by being reduplicated, as in the example below.

 

 

 

                         ‘autisti’        

         car^person++ all drive phone speak

         ‘All the drivers talk on the phone while driving.’

 

The mouthing autisti (‘drivers’) evokes the plural form of the corresponding Italian word and spreads on both car and person++. In these instances, person loses its lexical meaning and functions as a morphosyntactic marker of plurality. These instances suggest that in the future, the sign person could grammaticalise into the agentive affix, but these processes are known to take time to happen.