A Grammar of Italian Sign Language (LIS)

The most obvious subtype of imperatives includes positive and negative orders. Orders express the will of the speaker for someone to do or not do something. An example of a sentence expressing an order in LIS is offered below.

 

 

 

                              fe

         eat palm_up   

         ‘Eat!’

 

In this sentence, the verb eat is immediately followed by a specific sign, glossed palm_up, illustrated in the following image.

 

                   

         palm_up

 

palm_up, which can be considered as a manual marker of the imperative, is optionally present in LIS positive imperative sentences andis produced with the palm facing upwards. It spatially agrees with the locus associated with the person the command is given to. When used to convey a command, palm_up is produced with a short straight tensed movement.

         When the addressee is plural, palm_up is produced with an arc-movement. The following videos illustrate the contrast between the singular (a) and plural form (b) of palm_up.

 

 

 

                                                   re

         a.            eat palm_up_sg

         ‘You guy eat!’

 

 

 

                                                   re

         b.            eat palm_up_pl

         ‘You guys eat!’

 

A different sign (glossed movimp) surfaces in LIS imperative sentences when the addressee must move to a different position to obey the command.

         The movimp sign, which is illustrated in the following picture, displays an arc movement towards a locus associated to the signer’s left or right area in signing space (but for some signers movimp displays an unspread 5handshape if the addressee is plural).

 

                     

         movimp

 

The following is an imperative sentence with movimp.

 

 

 

                              fe

         sleep movimp

         ‘Go to sleep!’

 

As suggested by the translation, the addressee must move to a different position in order to obey the command.

         movimp occupies a postverbal position, just like palm_up. However, movimp and palm_up can never co-occur in the same sentence. This suggests they realize the same function in LIS imperative sentences, although movimp is more specialized, since it implies that the addressee must make a movement to obey the command.

         The manual signs glossed as movimp and palm_up are not the only elements marking the imperative in LIS. A crucial syntactic component of LIS imperative sentences is the presence of specific non-manuals, although what non-manual is produced in imperatives is subject to individual variation. In fact, non-manual marking is sufficient to indicate a command in absence of imperative manual signs, as in the following sentence, where the relevant non-manual marking is furrowed eyebrows (fe).

 

 

 

                             fe

         kneel_down

         ‘Kneel down!’