Indexical signs (IX) in clause-final position in Italian Sign Language (LIS): a preliminary study.

Abstract

This thesis investigates the linguistic phenomenon in which an indexical sign (IX) occurs in clause-final position in Italian Sign Language (LIS). The aim of this study is to determine its linguistic status and the extent of its usage. Deaf native LIS signers recruited in this study have been asked to participate to a grammaticality judgement task and a sentence repetition task, whose input sentences are signed by a deaf native LIS signer. Clause-final IX subjects and clause-final IX (direct) objects are analyzed in different sentence types, namely declarative sentences, polar interrogative sentences, and wh- interrogative sentences. The proposal here advanced is that clause-final IX subjects are instances of inversion, while clause-final IX (direct) objects are instances of extraction from the DP object, used to fulfill different syntactic and pragmatic purposes.