Sign languages are the languages used by Deaf communities around the world, linguistic systems that were considered pure gestural systems, not true languages, until very recently.
Their history is characterized by a deep isolation from the hearing commu- nity and by misconceptions and prejudices regarding their true linguistic status and cultural heritage. A symbolic date sanctioning their disappearance from all educational environments1 and delaying linguistic investigation on them (for almost a hundred years) is 1880. This is when the International Congress of Milan, composed of only hearing members, discussed the future education of Deaf people and voted against the use of signs and in favour of a strict oral education. From then on, signing was banned from any educa- tional context and Deaf people were discouraged from gathering with or marrying other Deaf people as a strategy to avoid the use of signs, which was considered an obstacle in learning the oral language. Such resolution deeply affected the social, working, and cultural life of Deaf people around the world.
The new educational programs, while failing in the methods adopted and causing the degradation of Deaf education, created a fracture between the hearing and the Deaf community. The prohibition to use their first language greatly increased the difficulty in acquiring the oral language, marginalizing the Deaf. It has been, in fact, verified that Deaf people with good compe- tence in a sign language will more easily acquire an oral language (Logan, Mayberry and Fletcher 1996). Furthermore, the new dispositions also discouraged any contact among Deaf people thus isolating them from both hearing society and their Deaf peers.
Both results, namely, a degrading education for the Deaf and their social marginalization, had lasting effects that, for many Deaf communities, including the Italian one, persist still today.
Nonetheless, sign languages secretly survived in the dormitories of the schools and in social places where the Deaf met.
Linguistic investigation of sign languages is rather recent, dating back to 1960 when the American linguist William Stokoe detected in the signs of American Sign Language (ASL) an organization very similar to the phono- logical structure of words identified in oral languages.
Stokoe’s studies were soon followed by linguistic, psychological and neurological investigations into ASL. The first steps of linguistic research on sign languages have been devoted to finding important correspondences
between sign and oral languages in the attempt to provide evidence for their equal linguistic status.
Indeed, linguistic (but also psychological and neurological) studies on sign languages carried out in the last fifty years have detected the same grammatical complexity and the same linguistic principles at play in oral languages. Despite some modality-specific characteristics, today the clear conclusion is that sign languages are true linguistic systems displaying struc- tures, rules and expressive abilities comparable in power and complexity to the ones characterizing oral languages.
Nonetheless, it is very important to stress that sign languages are inde- pendent linguistic systems not derived from any oral language. Although sharing with spoken languages the same universal linguistic principles, in fact, sign languages display interesting syntactic mechanisms deeply connected to the different modality and to the linguistic use of the three- dimensional space available.2
In this sense, sign languages represent an interesting field of research for linguistic theory in general and for generative grammar in particular:
their investigation allows linguists to detect linguistic universals shared by all languages independently of modality, and to enrich typological studies by revealing the existence of new modality-specific parameters.
Besides its theoretical relevance for linguistic research, sign language investigation has proved to be crucial in reducing the social and cultural isolation of Deaf communities from hearing society. Not only have such studies deepened our understanding of sign languages, but they have also helped to promote the diffusion of these languages in educational environ- ments, contributing to the establishment of both deaf and hearing teachers.
While research on ASL has profoundly benefited from Stokoe’s pioneering studies and has grown rapidly, investigation into other sign languages is rather recent. Within the framework of generative grammar, linguists have only recently started to investigate the different sign languages and provide interesting linguistic and cross-linguistic findings.
The present work concentrates on Italian Sign Language (LIS), the language of the Italian Deaf community.
Linguistic investigation on LIS dates back to the end of 1970s with the pioneering work of a group of researchers belonging to the CNR (Institute of Sciences and Cognition Technologies) in Rome and coordinated by Virginia Volterra. The first studies of LIS concentrated on aspects of its phonology and lexical morphology, later extended to language acquisition in deaf chil- dren, the development of educational methods based on signing as opposed to oral methods, and the syntax of LIS.
Formal studies concentrating on aspects of the syntax and semantics of LIS are rather recent.
This work, based on my doctoral dissertation, aims to contribute to the understanding and discussion of LIS syntax by analyzing its instatiations of two well-studied structures within the generative tradition: relative and cleft constructions.
While the literature on the syntax of relativization has reached substan- tial consensus, the debate on the syntax of cleft structures is still open. By presenting and discussing the LIS data on relativization strategies and cleft constructions, I try to shed some light on their syntax through adopting a constant cross-linguistic perspective. This allows a direct comparison between the LIS data and the data on spoken languages and, when avail- able, on other sign languages, thus locating the analysis of relativization and clefting in LIS within the broader theoretical and typological discussion of relativization and clefts in spoken languages. Towards this end, two chap- ters of the book are devoted to the proposals that have been advanced in the literature on spoken languages to represent and derive relative clauses (chapter 3) and cleft constructions (chapter 7).
For the domains of both relativization and clefting, the theories advanced in the literature will be challenged by the LIS data, and original proposals will be presented to explain the various constructions therein.
The cross-linguistic view the book takes on allows it to be addressed to students and researchers acquainted with sign linguistics as well as those with a solid background in formal theoretical linguistics but no specific knowledge of sign language and sign linguistics.
Conceptually, the book is divided into three parts: the first part presents a snap-shot of the Italian Deaf community from the eighteen century to date and illustrates the advances of linguistic research on LIS (chapter 1).
Within the first part, chapter 2 introduces the reader to those aspects of LIS syntax relevant to the empirical investigation presented and discussed in the following chapters. Chapter 2 opens with an overview of some modality- specific features shared by all sign languages like the use of space, move- ment, and the simultaneous employment of manual and non-manual components. Specifically, it is shown how space is employed at all linguistic levels (phonological, morphological, syntactic) playing a crucial role in morphological verb agreement and referentiality, while movement conveys information on aspect and manner. Linguistic non-manuals are analyzed as the realization of syntactic features, exemplified by Geraci’s (2006) descrip- tion of the non-manual correlate of negation.
Finally, the chapter offers an analysis of LIS according to the representa- tion of the clause in the three structural layers of the complementizer phrase (CP), the inflectional phrase (IP), and the verb phrase (VP). Far from being exhaustive, the tentative skeleton of LIS sketched in this chapter provides a picture of the present knowledge on its syntax, presenting many gaps to be filled by future research.
Chapter 2 closes by presenting some preliminary data on relative and cleft constructions in LIS as well as the theoretical challenges they pose that cannot be adequately addressed by a simple language-internal analysis, thus calling for a cross-linguistic investigation of the phenomena.
The second part of the book is devoted to relativization.
Chapter 3 presents a detailed description of the syntax and semantics of relativization provided by the literature on spoken languages. I first illus- trate the main features of the different syntactic typologies displayed by world languages to express relativization, namely, externally headed relative clauses (EHRCs), internally headed relative clauses (IHRCs), free relatives (FRs) and correlative clauses. The three semantic interpretations available to the strategies of relativization, restrictive, non-restrictive and maximal- izing, are then described and their properties discussed. A representation of the syntactic typologies is provided by applying Kayne’s (1994) head raising analysis to headed relatives (EHRCs and IHRCs). The syntactic representa- tion of free relatives is discussed against the main theoretical approaches, while Dayal’s (1991) and Bhatt’s (2003) proposals are applied to the analysis of correlative clauses. The chapter closes with the structural representation of the semantic types of restrictive and non-restrictive relatives.
Chapter 4 is a survey of relative constructions in sign languages. As linguistic research on sign languages increases, seminal investigation on the equivalent of relative clauses has been recently carried out. Relativization strategies are described in American Sign Language, Brazilian Sign Language, German Sign Language, Turkish Sign Language, Catalan Sign Language and Hong Kong Sign Language.
Chapter 5 discusses methodological issues involved in sign language research. I address some issues connected with the elicitation of sign language data in general and LIS data in particular. I discuss different factors influencing the production of signers ranging from sociolinguistic to educa- tional aspects that the interviewer must be aware of and possibly control in his/her research. I clarify and describe the methodologies and collection procedures employed in this work and the research technologies used during the gathering and analysis of the data presented in chapter 6 and chapter 8.
The informants consulted in this work are then introduced and the glossing system is explained.
In chapter 6, the theoretical investigations on relativization taken up by typological studies first (Keenan and Comrie 1977, a.o.) and continued from the beginning of generative grammar studies (Chomsky 1965; Vergnaud 1974; Grimshaw 1975; Bresnan 1976, a.o.) on spoken languages presented in chapter 3 are applied to the analysis of the LIS data. Following the pioneering work by Cecchetto, Geraci and Zucchi (2006), a specialized LIS structure equivalent to a relative construction is described and two competing anal- yses compared: a correlative analysis (as implemented by Cecchetto et al.
2006) and a specific implementation of an internally headed relative clause analysis. The two analyses are tested against the LIS data, indicating that the internally headed option better accounts for them. The structure proposed for LIS relatives reveals interesting connections between different typolo- gies of relativization, namely, IHRCs, correlatives and free relatives, thus suggesting the boundaries between relativization strategies are not as strict as generally believed.
The semantic interpretation of LIS relative constructions is then discussed.
After presenting Cecchetto et al.’s (2006) arguments for a non-restrictive interpretation, the relevant structure is examined against a battery of tests for a restrictive versus non-restrictive interpretation, and for a restrictive versus maximalizing interpretation.
The third part of the book is devoted to clefting.
The main constitutive elements and properties of cleft constructions in world languages are presented in chapter 7. This chapter discusses the two competing theories on cleft derivation proposed in the literature on spoken languages, the extraposition analysis (Jespersen 1927; Akmajian 1970;
Emonds 1976; Gundel 1977; Wirth 1978; Percus 1997; Hedberg 2000, a.o.) and the expletive analysis (Jespersen 1937; Chomsky 1977; Williams 1980;
Delin 1989; Delahunty 1982; Huddlestone 1984; Rochemont 1986; Heggie 1988; Kiss 1998, a.o.). Recent cartographic perspectives on clefts are also presented and data on clefts in null subject languages with a null copula are illustrated.
The third part of the book closes with chapter 8, presenting a seminal description and analysis of a dedicated LIS structure that I claim to be the LIS equivalent of cleft constructions. The LIS data are analyzed against the two competing proposals discussed in chapter 7. The implementation by Kiss (1998) of the expletive analysis and by Percus (1997) of the extraposi- tion analysis are applied to the LIS data, and a proposal under the expletive analysis is suggested to derive the equivalent of LIS clefts.
