EVALUATIVE MORPHOLOGY IN ITALIAN SIGN LANGUAGE (LIS)

Abstract

The present dissertation investigates the existence and realization of processes conveying features of diminutive, augmentative, endearment and pejorative in Italian Sign Language (LIS). Within the theoretical background of the Cartographic Project and Linguistic Typology, this work is also an attempt to demonstrate whether the theory of the extended projection of the NP proposed by Cinque (2005, 2015) accounts for LIS as well, by observing if the order of LIS constituents respects the universal one. For the investigation, I developed a research involving three LIS native signers in tasks of elicitation, narration and grammaticality judgements and I analysed a corpus of 22 tales produced in LIS by LIS native signers. The objective was to see if those features usually defined by the adjectives big, small, cute, ugly, could be incorporated in the sign of the noun and conveyed without the articulation of the sign of the adjective. The results demonstrated that non-manual markers and classifiers have a main role in these processes and that their articulation respects the position of their functional projections within the syntactic structure, supporting my hypothesis to concern NNMs conveying features of diminutive, augmentative, endearment and pejorative as heads of dedicated functional projections. Finally, I confirm that processes of evaluative morphology constitute a morphological type while providing examples from other sign languages: ASL, LSF, ISL, BSL, DGS, PJM, AdaSL.