A Grammar of Italian Sign Language (LIS)

The cognitive process underlying metaphors is a general property which belongs to natural languages. Indeed, many expressions in everyday life are metaphorically derived. Generally, a metaphor is conceived as an abstract concept mapped to and understood through a more concrete concept. The abstract schema through which metaphors are represented is generally X is Y. A common example is the association between the concrete concept of journey and the broader abstract concept of life. Life is often considered as a journey, and consequently other features of the two spheres are combined: for example, the difficulties of life are associated to travel barriers, or the growing process is associated to the process of discovery which is enabled by travelling. Therefore, in the schema below, the X domain (the source) could be interpreted as journey and the Y domain (the target) as life. The internal connections (e.g. x1 – y1, x2 – y2, x3 – y3) can be considered as the associations created between the source and the target domain, as displayed by the figure below.

         Figure: Schema illustrating metaphor mappings (recreated from Quer et al., 2017: 761)

As in other sign languages, some lexical signs in LIS are derived from metaphorical mappings: in these cases, abstract concepts are metaphorically mapped into concrete concepts, which in turns are iconically depicted in signs thanks to the visual-gestural channel.

         For example, in the sign cultured the dominant hand seems to hold a huge book at the level of the forehead. Therefore, this sign iconically expresses the wide knowledge of someone by representing this knowledge as a big book in the head, as shown in the picture below. The non-manual markers associated with this sign, namely teeth on the lips and squint eyes, are typically used with an evaluative function (PRAGMATICS 2.2.1), enhancing the idea of a wide knowledge.

         cultured

In this case, a concrete concept (the book) is metaphorically mapped to the abstract meaning of the sign (the fact of being well educated).