Italian Sign Language

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Italian Sign Language or LIS (Lingua dei Segni Italiana) is the manual language employed by deaf in Italy. It began to be deeply analyzed in the '80s, in the line of what William Stokoe had made with American Sign Language in the '60s. Until recently, most of the studies about Italian Sign Language deal with its phonology and vocabulary.

[edit] Structure

Like many signed languages, LIS is very different from its "spoken neighbour", so that it has little in common with spoken Italian but shares some features with non-Indoeuropean oral languages (e.g. it is verb final, like the Basque language; it has inclusive and exclusive pronominal forms like oceanic languages; interrogative particles are verb final You go where?).

A sign variety of spoken Italian also exists, the so-called Signed Italian (Italiano Segnato) which combines LIS lexicon with the grammar of spoken Italian: this is not Italian Sign Language, however.

Some features of LIS are typical of signed languages in general, e.g. agreement between nouns, adjectives and verbs is not based on gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) but it is based on place, that is the spatial position in which the sign is performed: nouns can be placed everywhere in the space but their position must be consistent with that of pronouns and verbs. The LIS translation of the sentence "The child speaks to the mother" appears as Child-here mother-there this-speak-that , rather than involving forms like "he, she". The voice intonation is replaced by facial expressions which mark interrogative sentences, imperatives and relative clauses. Other features of Italian Sign Language which can be found also in oral languages are: classifiers; dual, trial, quattrial and even quinquial forms in addition to the general plural; verbs inflected for person.

[edit] Controversy

Most people still do not see Italian Sign Language as a true language: thus, its status resembles in many respects that of the so-called "dialects of Italy" in that LIS is heavily influenced by spoken Italian though having its own grammar with its own morphology and syntax. For example many Italian deaf put the verb at the end of the sentence when communicating in LIS (child mother he-speak-her, SOV word order), but hearing LIS interpreters in television often show the SVO order of spoken Italian (the child speaks to the mother).