A Grammar of Italian Sign Language (LIS)

Different manual signs are available to mark factual conditionals. The following list is not exhaustive of the variants used on the national territory. The more commonly used are the sign glossed if(1) produced either as a one-handed or two-handed sign (a-b), the sign glossed if(2) (c), the sign glossed if(3), a variant from the northern-east city of Trieste (d), the sign glossed if(4), a variant from the city of Turin (e), the sign glossed in_case (f), and the sign glossed occasion (g).

 

                                      

         a.            if(1) (one-handed sign)         

 

                   

         b.            if(1) (two-handed sign)         

 

                          

         c.            if(2)                                                               

 

                   

         d.            if(3) (Trieste)

 

                   

         e.            if(4) (Turin)   

 

                   

         f.            in_case

 

                   

         g.            occasion

 

Manual markers are optional. When present, they occur at the beginning of the antecedent clause and they co-occur with the obligatory non-manual markers spreading over the antecedent clause, as shown below.

 

 

 

                     cd

                    re

         if rain go_out not

         ‘If it rains, I don’t go out.’

 

When the manual marker is absent, the obligatory non-manual markers alone are able to mark the sentence as a conditional clause.