A preliminary description of evaluative morphology in LIS

Abstract

This paper provides a preliminary description of evaluative morphology in Italian Sign Language improving a previous study by Petitta, Di Renzo, and Chiari (2015). The analysis of both elicited and corpus data reveals that LIS employs both manual and nonmanual articulators to convey evaluative features. Specifically, dedicated non-manual markers for each evaluative value combine with manual strategies involving the production of adjectives to convey endearment and pejorative, or morphological operations to encode diminutive and augmentative features: (i) manual sequential evaluation: the evaluative feature is conveyed through size and shape specifiers following the sign for the noun and displaying a modified articulation depending on the feature involved; (ii) manual simultaneous evaluation: the manual sign for the noun is modified in its articulation (restricted for the diminutive, enlarged for the augmentative). Overall, the morphological constructions detected fit the typological classification proposed for sign languages as languages exhibiting agglutinative morphology (Schuit 2007), while sharing the abstract properties identified for evaluative morphology in spoken languages, regardless of the different modality employed.