A Grammar of Italian Sign Language (LIS)

Attitude role shift is typically used to report utterances, thoughts, or attitudes of other persons. The following sentence illustrates the occurrence of attitude role shift. Several features should be stressed. First, after the main verb the signer shifts his body towards the locus associated to 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). Finally, tomorrow is evaluated with respect to the moment of Gianni’s utterance, whence the translation.

                                                                                        rs: Gianni

         yesterday gianni_a ix_{a 3a}tell₁ ix₁ tomorrow leave  

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

Attitude role shift is functionally similar to direct speech in spoken languages. By using direct speech, one reports an utterance from the perspective of the person to whom that utterance is attributed. If yesterday Gianni said the sentence ‘I’ll leave tomorrow’ and I want to report this to someone else by using direct speech, I can utter the sentence ‘Gianni said: ‘I’ll leave tomorrow’’.