A Grammar of Italian Sign Language (LIS)

Verbs combine with a specific number of referents or participants in order to express a full predication that refers to an event or a situation. Participants that obligatory appear with a predicate are called arguments. The argument-taking property of a predicate constitutes the argument structure of that predicate.   

         The argument structure of a predicate in LIS is strictly connected to the number and type of arguments required by its syntax to represent an event.

Arguments are typically distinguished by their role (also called thematic role) in the event or state the sentence talks about. For example, an argument can receive the (thematic) role of agent (the argument which starts an action, as ‘Gianni’ in ‘Gianni broke the window’), theme/patient (the argument which is affected by the action, as ‘the window’ in ‘Gianni broke the window’) goal (the argument which is the final point of a transfer as ‘Gianni’ in ‘Maria gave Gianni a letter’) or experiencer (the argument to which a certain psychological state is attributed, as ‘Gianni’ in ‘Gianni is happy’).

Commonly, arguments of a predicate are associated with the subject, the direct object and the indirect object. In this respect, arguments are different from adjuncts, represented, for example, by time, locative, and manner adverbials, since they contribute to the knowledge of the event with additional, non-required information.

In this section, we describe how arguments are mapped onto the syntactic structure of LIS predicates. This is a domain where syntax and morphology interact, so overlapping between sections of the lexicon, morphology and syntax within the grammar are expected.

         LIS displays transitive, ditransitive and intransitive verbs and the type of verb determines the number and type of arguments. The syntactic and thematic role of arguments is equally important in the argument structure of LIS predicates: while the syntactic role (subject, direct object, and indirect object) determines the position of the argument in the sentence (SYNTAX 2.3.1.1), the thematic role (agent versus theme, for example) can influence the hand configuration of a class of predicates, namely classifier predicates (SYNTAX 2.1.1.5).

         We will see that arguments may be expressed through noun phrases, pronouns, full clauses, or they can be incorporated in classifier predicates. The type of argument produced may affect the word order of elements in the sentence (SYNTAX 2.3) and, vice versa, the type of predicate employed may have an impact on the overt realization of arguments. We will illustrate how LIS displays pairs of predicates with the same verbal root, but with an intrinsically different argument structure. We will observe transitive/intransitive and unaccusative/unergative alternation of the predicate pair, determining a different selection of arguments.