A Grammar of Italian Sign Language (LIS)

Exclamatives are grammatical forms that convey the information that something is surprising or noteworthy in some way: in an exclamative, all the content expressed by the sentence or part of it is unexpected. If the surprising information concerns the whole sentence, we have a total exclamative, if the unexpected content is limited to a constituent of the sentence, we have a partial exclamative. An example of total exclamative in Italian is the following: Oggi fa molto freddo! (‘Today it’s very cold!’). In languages like Italian, the constituent that expresses the surprising information is introduced by a wh-element, as in the following partial exclamative: Che bel vestito che hai comprato! (‘What a nice dress you bought!’).

         In LIS, we have found a distinction between total and partial exclamatives, based on the two different kinds of non-manual markers used when the two types of sentences are articulated: (a), an example of a total exclamative, is produced with raised eyebrows (re); (b), an example of a partial exclamative, is produced with furrowed eyebrows (fe). No specific manual sign introduces the two types of sentences.

                                                     re

            a.         cake pe ix₁ adore

         ‘I’m crazy about that cake!’

                             fe

            b.         rain

         ‘How much it rains!’