A Grammar of Italian Sign Language (LIS)

Negative particles can be employed in LIS to realise negative derivation. This morphological process is a word-formation process that derives the negative counterpart of existing nouns or adjectives. Therefore, in this section we do not address negation of predicates or sentences since they are inflectional phenomena explored in MORPHOLOGY 3.5 and SYNTAX 1.5.

         The most common strategy for negative derivation consists in the articulation of the negative sign not after the noun or adjective. Compare (a) with the negative counterpart in (b) below.

         a.            alcoholic

         b.            alcoholic^not

         ‘Non-alcoholic’

The negative marker neg_s can be employed to convey the meaning ‘without’. In the example below, neg_s follows the sign sugar in order to describe which type of candy a person with diabetes can eat.

         candy_a ix(dem)_a sugar^neg_s eat be_able

         ‘(S/he) can eat the sugar-free candy.’

Both the constructions alcoholic^not and sugar^neg_s form lexical units. The addition of the negative particle can be considered a derivational process in that it is employed to derive a new lexical item. However, the morphological status of the negative particle as suffix or member of a compound is not clear due to the great variability in use and productivity among signers.