A Grammar of Italian Sign Language (LIS)

Role shift is a strategy that may be used in contexts where direct speech is used but has a much more general distribution. It is characterized by two general properties.  Semantically, the expressions that are signed under role shift are somehow interpreted ‘from another person’s perspective’, or ‘with respect to another context’ than the context of the actual speech act.

         Morpho-syntactically, role shift is overtly marked by some modification, which may involve: i) body shift, ii) change in the direction of eye gaze, and/or iii) altered facial expressions in order to mark that the signer is adopting somebody else’s perspective. We will distinguish between role shift as used to report someone else’s speech or thought (attitude role shift), and role shift used to describe physical actions performed by someone else (action role shift, also called constructed action).

         The following sentence illustrates the occurrence of attitude role-shift. Two features should be stressed. First, after the main verb the signer shifts his body towards the locus associated with the main subject (‘Gianni’) to indicate that the rest of the utterance should be interpreted from this person’s perspective. Second, and related to this, the first person pronoun ix₁ in the embedded subject position does not refer to the actual speaker, as is normally the case with indexical pronouns, but, rather, to the person whose perspective is adopted (namely ‘Gianni’).

 

 

 

                                          rs: Gianni

         gianni say ix₁ leave soon

         ‘Gianni said that he would leave soon.’

 

Other expressions are not evaluated with respect to the context of the actual speech act under role shift. Other deictic expressions (PRAGMATICS 1.1) do the same. These include expressions like ix(loc)_[proximal], ix(loc)_[distal], today, tomorrow, now, etc. For example, in the following sentence tomorrow is evaluated with respect to the moment of Gianni’s utterance, hence the translation.

 

 

 

                                                                           rs: Gianni

         yesterday gianni say₁ ix₁ leave tomorrow

         ‘Yesterday Gianni told me that he would leave today.’

 

Attitude role shift somewhat resembles direct speech in spoken languages in that it is intended to report more or less faithfully the words or the mental content of the person whose perspective is adopted.

         Action role shift is not used to report the content of a thought or of an utterance, but to describe an action. By using action role shift the signer becomes the agent of the action and this is indicated (among other things) by body shift towards the position in space associated with the actual person who performed the action. For example, in the following sentence, the verb donate starts being articulated from the signer’s body, but, as the signer shifts towards the position associated with Gianni, the sentence indicates that the person who performed the action is not the actual speaker, but Gianni.

 

 

 

                                 re                                                            rs: Gianni

         gianni arrive book ₁CL(flat open 5): ‘donate_book’₂

         ‘When Gianni arrives, he will give you the book as a present.’

 

However, by using action role shift, the signer does not simply report that someone else performed a given action, but can also indicate how that action was performed.

         In the following sentences, the use of role shift allows the signer to show, instead of describing it, the gracious act of Gianni (a) and the angry attitude of the customer (b). The possibility to directly express how the action is performed, including the body language of the protagonist of the action, makes action role shift a very powerful narrative device.

 

 

 

                                                                                                                                                    rs: Gianni

         a.            gianni house arrive. maria ix₁ flower ₁CL(closed 5): ‘donate_flower’₂

         ‘Gianni arrived. He donated flowers to Maria.’

 

 

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 rs: customer

         b.            ix₁ quiet ix₁ see waiter mistake CL(curved open L): ‘drop_dish’ customer CL(curved open L): ‘drop_dish’₁ CL(5): ‘food_fall_on’₁ get_angry ₁insulte++₂

         ‘While there, I see a waiter making a mistake. He makes a dish fall on a customer,   who gets dirty. The customer insults the waiter angrily.’

 

Another noticeable property is that, when reporting a dialogue or an event involving multiple persons, the signer can role shift into (assume the perspective of) multiple characters. This may happen sequentially, as when the signer shifts back and forth between two loci in the signing space linked to two characters, or simultaneously, when, in action role shift, the dominant and non-dominant hands represent two characters involved in some action.