Sentence Topic Types in Italian Sign Language

• Chiara Calderone ^[1]
  1. [1] Università Ca̛ Foscari, Venezia
• Localización: Linguistic Analysis, ISSN 0098-9053, Vol. 43, Nº. 1-2, 2022 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Barcelona Conference on Syntax, Semantics, & Phonology), págs. 99-131
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The present research investigates the prosodic realization and the syntactic distribution of two types of topics in Italian Sign Language (LIS): aboutness topics and scene-setting topics. The former conveys shared knowledge between the speaker/signer and the addressee and represents what the sentence is about; the latter has a more controversial nature and sets the framework within which the proposition holds. In particular, when discussing aboutness topics, we analyse the relation to the informational status (shifted or continued) and the linguistic catego- rization of the referential information (nominal and pronominal forms or null arguments). Nine native signers were involved in the research and two different types of data were collected and analysed through the multimodal annotation tool ELAN and the “R” software. The results show that aboutness and scene-setting topics are not necessarily always accompanied by manual or nonmanual markers; however frequent tenden- cies have been identified: raised eyebrows (marking both aboutness and scene-setting topics), squinted eyes (mostly marking shifted aboutness topics realized as nominal expression and scene-setting topics expressing locations), head tilt back marking pronominal subject aboutness topics;

    finally, eye blink and head nod are prosodic boundary markers which divide the topic items from the remaining part of the sentence.

    From a syntactic point of view, these two types of topics are inves- tigated with respect to their distribution and a preliminary syntactic hierarchy is traced as follows: scene-setting topics of time> scene-setting topics of location> aboutness topics. This seminal study on topicaliza- tion in LIS also sheds light on the linguistic communicative strategies used by signers to manage old information in LIS which is encoded as nominal, pronominal, or null referential expressions. In line with the linguistic principle of quantity, the more accessible a referent is, the less linguistic material is needed in order to retrieve it, and vice versa.

    LIS signers make specific linguistic choices depending on the degree of accessibility and on the informational status of referents which are kept salient or reintroduced into the discourse. The choice of nominal forms shows a statistically significant correlation with both the reintroduced status of a referent and the prosodic marker of squinted eyes. The results demonstrate the crucial role of syntax with respect to the prosodic and pragmatic aspects of communication.

    Keywords: aboutness topics, scene-setting topics, informational status, accessibility, shifted topics, continued topics, sign languages, Italian Sign Language