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Negation can be considered a shared social action that develops since early infancy with very basic acts of refusals or rejection. Inspired by an approach to the embodiment of concepts known as Multiple Representation Theories (MRT, henceforth), the present paper explores negation as an embodied action that relies on both sensorimotor and linguistic/social information. Despite the different variants, MRT accounts share the basic ideas that both linguistic/social and sensorimotor information concur to the processes of concepts formation and representation and that the balance between these components depends on the kind of concept, the context, or the performed task. In the present research we will apply the MRT framework for exploring negation in Italian sign language (LIS). The nature of negation in LIS has been explored in continuity with the co-speech gesture where negative elements are encoded through differentiated prosodic and gestural strategies across languages. Data have been collected in naturalistic settings that may allow a much wider understanding of negation both in speech and in spoken language with a semi-structured interview. Five LIS participants with age range 30–80 were recruited and interviewed with the aim of understanding the continuity between gesture and sign in negation. Results highlight that negation utterances mirror the functions of rejection, non-existence and denial that have been described in language acquisition both in deaf and hearing children. These different steps of acquisition of negation show a different balance between sensorimotor, linguistic and social information in the construction of negative meaning that the MRT is able to enlighten.

Phrase-final lengthening is a quite common prosodic phenomenon, previously accounted for in several spoken and signed languages. This study aims at investigating the prosodic cues produced in correspondence with the final boundary of noun phrases in Italian Sign Language (LIS), analyzing corpus data from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. The quantitative analysis confirms that noun phrases in LIS are affected by phrase-final lengthening (i.e. in noun phrases including one nominal modifier, on average, postnominal modifiers are longer than prenominal ones) and reveals that the various modifier classes show different degrees of sensitivity to this phenomenon. Building on these results, the qualitative analysis explores in detail those modifier classes that show lengthening effects in the corpus: the main consequences in the phonological makeup of signs are insertion of movement repetition, prolonged path movement, final hold accompanied by head nod, and weak prop. The study also offers possible explanations for the fact that quantifiers, ordinals, and determinerlike pointing signs are less sensitive to lengthening effects in the phrase-final boundary, suggesting that particular morphosyntactic factors may come into play.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------EXPLORANDO OS EFEITOS DO ALONGAMENTO EM FINAL EM SINTAGMAS NOMINAIS DA LÍNGUA DE SINAIS ITALIANA (LIS)O alongamento final é um fenômeno prosódico comum, que já foi observado em diversas línguas orais e de sinais. Este estudo tem por objetivo investigar as pistas prosódicas produzidas em correspondência com os limites do sintagma nominal na língua de sinais italiana (LIS), analisando dados quantitativos e qualitativos oriundos de corpus. A análise quantitativa confirma que os sintagmas nominais em LIS são afetados pelo alongamento final (ex: em sintagmas nominais que incluem um modificador nominal, em média, modificadores pós-nominais são mais longos em comparação com os pré-nominais) e revela que as várias classes de modificadores exibem diferentes graus de sensitividade a este fenômeno. A partir dos resultados, a análise qualitativa explora em detalhes as classes de modificadores que demonstram os efeitos do alongamento no corpus: as principais consequências para a constituição fonológica dos sinais são a adição de uma repetição do movimento, um prolongamento da trajetória do movimento, suspensão final acompanhada por um aceno de cabeça e a sustentação fraca do sinal. O estudo traz também possíveis explicações para o fato de que os sinais quantificadores, ordinais e as apontações com função de determinante são menos sensíveis aos efeitos de alongamento nos limites fronteiriços entre os sintagmas, sugerindo que alguns fatores específicos de ordem morfossintática possam estar também em jogo.---Original em inglês.

The motivation for the project was the necessity of finding solutions to situations characterized by difficulty in communication, such as trading between different countries, immigrants unable to speak the language, or between hearing and deaf people who use sign language. These and other cases can be solved thanks to interpreting services. Yet because of educational commitments of professionals, organizational time, budget, and locations, it is not always possible to avail of an on-site interpreter. In this context, technology offers a solution through remote interpretation. The present draws inspiration from the research project “VEASYT Live! for conference: linguistic and technological solutions for the supply of video remote interpreting services in conference settings”. The work was financed by the European Social Fund and took place between 2016 and 2017 in the Linguistic and Cultural Compared Studies Department of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in partnership with VEASYT srl, a company that developed a video remote interpreting (VRI) service in both vocal languages and Italian Sign Language. The aim of the research is to develop VRI for conference situations such as seminars, conferences and academic lectures.

Shifts in the awareness towards language may lead to new language attitude and to a selection process of certain features among the many forms sign language can have in a community and ultimately to language change. Drawing from usage-based views (Bybee, 2006; Hopper, 1987), from studies on perception and attitudes (McKenzie 2015; Dragojevic et al., 2021) and from ethnography of communication (Hymes, 1974), this paper will investigate with the matched guise and participant observation techniques how specific linguistic features are guided by the participants’ language awareness and attitudes. Ten deaf participants (age range 28-82) were shown four videos with signers using different formal registers of LIS and were asked questions about their signing style in a natural setting. Levels of language awareness were analyzed in the light of Culioli (1990) in accordance with a sign language awareness scale and correlated with language attitudes. Results show that language attitude is shaped by language ideologies and awareness which leads to a selection of communicative patterns made legitimate by the community in the direction of autonomy, purism and identity preservation.

The present study examined the role of psycholinguistic variables, as well as the presence of a global factor, in modulating reading speed and accuracy in individuals with a severe hearing impairment. Thirteen deaf and thirteen hearing young adults who completed high school and were proficient in both oral lipreading and Italian sign language were examined and compared to a group of control subjects matched for gender, age and education. A wide spectrum of psycholinguistic variables affecting reading were examined, marking visual (letter confusability), sub-lexical (length, grapheme contextuality), lexical (frequency, N-size, stress) and semantic (age of acquisition and imageability) processes. Vocal reaction times (RT) in reading aloud single words were slower in deaf participants with respect to hearing subjects but they were affected by psycholinguistic variables in a very similar way than in the case of controls. Moreover, deaf individuals did not show a multiplicative effect as a function of word difficulty in their reading slowness but only a constant delay. Overall, the deficit shown by deaf participants was relatively limited and not associated to specific cognitive processes. This finding is in keeping with the idea that at least some individuals with a severe hearing impairment may reach reasonably high levels of word decoding.

The present paper will explore the impacts of the recent pandemic crisis on the Italian Deaf community, as a linguistic minority. Recent research has shown that minorities are suffering much more the effects of the pandemia because their lack of access to services and in a much wider perspective, to education and welfare. We will show that, during the COVID crisis, despite lockdown measures, various actions at the formal political level (from the Italian Deaf Association) and at the informal level (from the members of the community) promoted sign language and the Deaf community within the hearing majority. In particular, we will analyse how social networks were exploited at the grassroot level in order to promote social cohesion and share information about the coronavirus emergency and how the Deaf community shaped the interpreting services on the public media. The role of social networks, however, has gone far beyond the emergency as it has allowed deaf people to create a new virtual space where it was possible to discuss the appropriateness of various linguistic choices related to the COVID lexicon and to argue about the various interpreting services. Furthermore, in such emergency, the interpreting services were shaped following the needs expressed by the Deaf community with the results of an increased visibility of Italian sign language (LIS) and empowerment of the community. Materials spontaneously produced by members of the Deaf Italian community (conferences, debates, fairy tales, and entertainment games) were selected, as well as materials produced by LIS interpreters committed to guaranteeing access to information. By highlighting the strategies that a minority group put in place to deal with the COVID-19 emergency, we can better understand the peculiarities of that community, creating a bridge between worlds that often travel in parallel for respecting the peculiarities of each other (deaf and hearing communities).

Contains fulltext : 246492.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) Meanings communicated with depictions constitute an integral part of how speakers and signers actually use language (Clark, 2016). Recent studies have argued that, in sign languages, depicting strategy like constructed action (CA), in which a signer enacts the referent, is used for referential purposes in narratives. Here, we tested the referential function of CA in a more controlled experimental setting and outside narrative context. Given the iconic properties of CA we hypothesized that this strategy could be used for efficient information transmission. Thus, we asked if use of CA increased with the increase in the information required to be communicated. Twenty-three deaf signers of LIS described unconnected images, which varied in the amount of information represented, to another player in a director–matcher game. Results revealed that participants used CA to communicate core information about the images and also increased the use of CA as images became informatively denser. The findings show that iconic features of CA can be used for referential function in addition to its depictive function outside narrative context and to achieve communicative efficiency. 30 p.

We propose a sign language recognition system based on wearable electronics and two different classification algorithms. The wearable electronics were made of a sensory glove and inertial measurement units to gather fingers, wrist, and arm/forearm movements. The classifiers were k-Nearest Neighbors with Dynamic Time Warping (that is a non-parametric method) and Convolutional Neural Networks (that is a parametric method). Ten sign-words were considered from the Italian Sign Language: cose, grazie, maestra, together with words with international meaning such as google, internet, jogging, pizza, television, twitter, and ciao. The signs were repeated one-hundred times each by seven people, five male and two females, aged 29&ndash, 54 y &plusmn, 10.34 (SD). The adopted classifiers performed with an accuracy of 96.6% &plusmn, 3.4 (SD) for the k-Nearest Neighbors plus the Dynamic Time Warping and of 98.0% &plusmn, 2.0 (SD) for the Convolutional Neural Networks. Our system was made of wearable electronics among the most complete ones, and the classifiers top performed in comparison with other relevant works reported in the literature.

Contains fulltext : 220150.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) A fundamental assumption about language is that, regardless of language modality, it faces the linearization problem, i.e., an event that occurs simultaneously in the world has to be split in language to be organized on a temporal scale. However, the visual modality of signed languages allows its users not only to express meaning in a linear manner but also to use iconicity and multiple articulators together to encode information simultaneously. Accordingly, in cases when it is necessary to encode informatively rich events, signers can take advantage of simultaneous encoding in order to represent information about different referents and their actions simultaneously. This in turn would lead to more iconic and direct representation. Up to now, there has been no experimental study focusing on simultaneous encoding of information in signed languages and its possible advantage for efficient communication. In the present study, we assessed how many information units can be encoded simultaneously in Italian Sign Language (LIS) and whether the amount of simultaneously encoded information varies based on the amount of information that is required to be expressed. Twenty-three deaf adults participated in a director-matcher game in which they described 30 images of events that varied in amount of information they contained. Results revealed that as the information that had to be encoded increased, signers also increased use of multiple articulators to encode different information (i.e., kinematic simultaneity) and density of simultaneously encoded information in their production. Present findings show how the fundamental properties of signed languages, i.e., iconicity and simultaneity, are used for the purpose of efficient information encoding in Italian Sign Language (LIS). 20 p.

Although international and Italian conventions have issued numerous communication protocols to assist people with disabilities during earthquakes or other maxi-emergencies, no tailored strategies exist to create and disseminate information online to deaf people. On August 24, 2016, a devastating earthquake destroyed Amatrice in Central Italy. This natural disaster underlined the lack of information on disabled people possibly involved and the lack of tailored, online communication tools. Having various registries listing disabled residents in the earthquake area might have benefitted emergency procedures. To access information easily and expedite risk management, the authors developed an online information tool for deaf persons, their families, and caregivers. Within hours after the earthquake, they published a Facebook page (Facebook, Inc.; Menlo Park, California USA) including a video provided with subtitles, Italian sign language, and service numbers. Those who accessed the Facebook page spread the information to other social media. Although no registry yet specifies figures, the annual incidence of approximately three to five/1,000 new deaf persons diagnosed in Italy implies that around 5.4% of the total 43,507 Italian deaf people live in the earthquake territory, and presumably 1.3% are younger than 18 years of age. The Facebook page obtained unexpectedly numerous accesses and satisfaction from deaf adults and families with deaf children, as well as hearing family relatives and caregivers. A total of 60% deaf and 10% hearing people asked for more information. Despite limitations, the effort to develop a page for deaf people and their families, via a world-wide social media, permits fast access, outlines safety precautions during maxi-emergencies, and disseminates essential information designed for deaf people on civil protection services. The Facebook page provides a replicable example for developing similar, user-friendly, online tools for disabled groups to disseminate important safety information after earthquakes or other maxi-emergencies.Rotondi L, Zuddas M, Marsella P, Rosati P. A Facebook page created soon after the Amatrice Earthquake for deaf adults and children, families, and caregivers provides an easy communication tool and social satisfaction in maxi-emergencies. Prehosp Disaster Med. 2019;34(2):137–141

Sign language recognition systems are used to convert signs in video streams to text automatically. In this work, an original isolated sign language recognition model is created using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Feature Pooling Module and Long Short-Term Memory Networks (LSTMs). In the CNN part, a pre-trained VGG-16 model is used identically in two parallel architectures, after adapting its weights to the dataset; in this architecture, the features from color (RGB) and depth streams are extracted in parallel. The extracted features are directed to FPM to generate multi-scale features. The features matrices are reduced to representative feature vectors, using Global Average Pooling (GAP). The features that are obtained from RGB and depth streams are concatenated and passed to the LSTM architecture after instance normalization. We get 93.15% test accuracy on Montalbano Italian sign language dataset using the proposed model; this result is comparable with the recent state-of-the-art methods.

Many properties of languages, including sign languages, are not uniformly distributed among items in the lexicon. Some of this nonuniformity can be accounted for by appeal to articulatory ease, with easier articulations being overrepresented in the lexicon in comparison to more difficult articulations. The literature on ease of articulation deals only with the active effort internal to the articulation itself. We note the existence of a previously unstudied aspect of articulatory ease, which we call reactive effort: the effort of resisting incidental movement that has been induced by an articulation elsewhere in the body. For example, reactive effort is needed to resist incidental twisting and rocking of the torso induced by path movement of the manual articulators in sign languages. We argue that, as part of a general linguistic drive to reduce articulatory effort, reactive effort should have a significant effect on the relative frequency in the lexicon of certain types of path movements. We support this argument with evidence from Italian Sign Language, Sri Lankan Sign Language, and Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, evidence that cannot be explained solely by appeal to constraints on bimanual coordination. As the first exploration of the linguistic role of reactive effort, this work contributes not only to the developing field of sign language phonetics, but also to our understanding of phonetics in general, adding to a growing body of functionalist literature showing that some linguistic patterns emerge from more fundamental factors of the physical world.

Signs and Structures: Formal Approaches to Sign Language Syntax, ed. Pawel Rutkowski (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015). ISBN 978-9-027-24259-4; EUR 80.00; Hardbound; 143 pages.SIGNS AND STRUCTURES: FORMAL APPROACHES TO SIGN LANGUAGE SYNTAX is a collection of papers published as a special issue of Sign Language & Linguistics 16(2) (2013); the papers were initially presented at the Warsaw conference on Formal and Experimental Advances in Sign Language Theory in 2012. Since this conference was not devoted to one particular topic, the book is also not thematically homogeneous. Nevertheless, the motivation for publishing this collection is clear and commendable: Its contributions reflect some of the most important directions in the current research on the syntax of sign languages within formal linguistics. The topics discussed in the book have been widely explored recently, and these papers add valuable data, analyses, and theoretical implications to the debate.The first contribution, by Natasha Abner, is devoted to the ASL possessive marker poss, which can be used attributively (e.g., bruno poss book "Bruno's book") and predicatively (book poss bruno "The book belongs to Bruno"). Contrary to previous analyses, Abner argues that the attributive poss is derived from the predicative poss. She provides several convincing arguments (from morphology, syntax, and semantics) in favor of her analysis. For instance, she notes that the predicative poss but not the attributive poss has a transitive agreement pattern and that some of the word orders possible for the predicative poss are not possible in the attributive construction. Semantically, the predicative poss is more restr icted: It can express only ownership (strict possession), but not other interpretations, such as authorship, so book poss bruno can mean only that he owns it, not that he wrote it. Focusing on the predicative poss, Abner shows that it is a verb: It appears in the same positions as lexical verbs, shows object and optional subject agreement, and can be aspectually marked. She then offers an explicit syntactic account in which predicative poss is combined with the possessor and the possessee to build a VP, and then the VP is embedded as a complement of a locative predicate (Loc), which forms a complex predicate together with poss. This (in combination with object shift) accounts for possible word orders in the predicative structure and also explains why only strict possession can be expressed by the predicative poss: The locative head is responsible for this semantic restriction. Attributive poss is not restricted this way because it is derived through relative clause formation that targets the structure below Loc. Other properties of attributive poss are also accounted for by the explicit analysis of the relative clause formation. The article is well argued and clearly written, which should also make it accessible to nonformal linguists.The second contribution, by Chiara Branchini and colleagues, addresses the phenomenon of wh-doubling (wh-duplication in the authors' terms) in Italian Sign Language (LIS). The phenomenon of doubling has recently received a good deal of attention, and a for mal analysis in term of Nunes's (2004) copy theory of movement has been suggested for other sign languages. However, previous research (including some conducted by the same authors) has claimed that LIS does not have wh-doubling. In this contribution the authors report that, in corpus data, 13 percent of all cases of wh-questions involve wh-doubling. The authors then use the corpus data to analyze general properties of this phenomenon and to demonstrate that the copies are phonologically and prosodically identical if one takes into account the effect of phrase-final lengthening. By drawing on additionally elicited data, the authors argue that the copies of the wh-word occur in Spec,CP (which is to the right in LIS) and in Spec,FocP (which is to the left). They account for the identical phonological realization of the copies and other syntactic properties of the construction by claiming that the copies actually belong to different chains sharing one foot (the in situ instance of the wh-word). …

Surface Electromyography (EMG) and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensors are gaining the attention of the research community as data sources for automatic sign language recognition. In this regard, we provide a dataset of EMG and IMU data collected using the Myo Gesture Control Armband, during the execution of the 26 gestures of the Italian Sign Language alphabet. For each gesture, 30 data acquisitions were executed, composing a total of 780 samples included in the dataset. The gestures were performed by the same subject (male, 24 years old) in lab settings. EMG and IMU data were collected in a 2 seconds time window, at a sampling frequency of 200 Hz.

In this paper, we examine agent backgrounding in Italian Sign Language (LIS). Specifically, we are interested in identifying and describing the strategies used by LIS signers to reduce referentiality. On the basis of low-referential contexts (cf. questionnaire in the Introduction chapter), we recorded target sentences containing potential markers of agent backgrounding and asked three LIS native signers to provide felicity judgments on them using a 7-point scale. We discuss agent-backgrounding strategies of different types: (i) manual, (ii) non-manual, and (iii) syntactic. Overall, our study shows that the combination of raised eyebrows and mouth-corners down associated with the existential quantifier someone and the sign person makes the agent-backgrounding reading more prominent. Other strategies that can be used in LIS to reduce referentiality are free relatives, perspective shift, and null subject. We also investigate in more detail the semantic status of someone, person, and the null subject through well-established tests from the literature.

Although numerous communication protocols and international and Italian conventions have been created to assist people with disabilities during earthquakes or other maxi-emergencies, no tailored strategies exist to disseminate information online to deaf people. On August 24, 2016, a devastating earthquake destroyed Amatrice in central Italy. This disaster highlighted the lack of registries listing disabled people possibly involved and tailored online communication tools. Having this information might have benefitted emergency procedures. To expedite information access and to improve risk management, we created an online information tool tailored for deaf persons. Within hours after the earthquake, we created a Facebook page including subtitled video, Italian sign language information and service numbers. People who accessed the Facebook page distributed the information on the various social media they used. Of a total of 43,507 Italian deaf people, about 0.4% lived in the earthquake territory. Our Facebook page obtained unexpectedly numerous accesses from deaf people and satisfaction from deaf and hearing people. A total of 60% deaf and 10% hearing people asked for more information. Despite limitations, our effort to create a page tailored to deaf people, via a worldwide social media, permits fast access and service information and outlines safety precautions during maxi-emergencies. Our Facebook page provides a starting point for developing other online tools to disseminate information for disabled groups after earthquakes or other maxi-emergencies.

In this paper, we investigate structural aspects of nominal modification in Italian Sign Language (LIS), a language with a relatively flexible word order. In order to tackle the issue, this study combines different approaches, including generalizations from typological universals on word order, their formal counterparts, and a variationist approach to language facts. Data come from the largest corpus of LIS currently available. Despite the absence of categorical rules, our mixed approach shows that LIS data are consistent with the general tenets of nominal modification. Results from the statistical analysis indicate that the attested language-internal variability is constrained both by linguistic and social factors. Specifically, a fine-grained structure of nominal modification is able to capture the internal variability of LIS. Processing effects, age, gender, and early exposure to the language also play a relevant role in determining order preferences.

In this paper the cognitive, cultural, and linguistic bases for a pattern of conventionalization of two types of iconic handshapes are described. Work on sign languages has shown that handling handshapes (H-HSs: those that represent how objects are handled or manipulated) and object handshapes (O-HSs: those that represent the class, size, or shape of objects) express an agentive/non-agentive semantic distinction in many sign languages. H-HSs are used in agentive event descriptions and O-HSs are used in non-agentive event descriptions. In this work, American Sign Language (ASL) and Italian Sign Language (LIS) productions are compared (adults and children) as well as the corresponding groups of gesturers in each country using "silent gesture." While the gesture groups, in general, did not employ an H-HS/O-HS distinction, all participants (signers and gesturers) used iconic handshapes (H-HSs and O-HSs together) more often in agentive than in no-agent event descriptions; moreover, none of the subjects produced an opposite pattern than the expected one (i.e., H-HSs associated with no-agent descriptions and O-HSs associated with agentive ones). These effects are argued to be grounded in cognition. In addition, some individual gesturers were observed to produce the H-HS/O-HS opposition for agentive and non-agentive event descriptions--that is, more Italian than American adult gesturers. This effect is argued to be grounded in culture. Finally, the agentive/non-agentive handshape opposition is confirmed for signers of ASL and LIS, but previously unreported cross-linguistic differences were also found across both adult and child sign groups. It is, therefore, concluded that cognitive, cultural, and linguistic factors contribute to the conventionalization of this distinction of handshape type.

Sign languages represent the most natural way to communicate for deaf and hard of hearing. However, there are often barriers between people using this kind of languages and hearing people, typically oriented to express themselves by means of oral languages. To facilitate the social inclusiveness in everyday life for deaf minorities, technology can play an important role. Indeed many attempts have been recently made by the scientific community to develop automatic translation tools. Unfortunately, not many solutions are actually available for the Italian Sign Language (Lingua Italiana dei Segni--LIS) case study, specially for what concerns the recognition task. In this paper, the authors want to face such a lack, in particular addressing the signer-independent case study, i.e., when the signers in the testing set are to included in the training set. From this perspective, the proposed algorithm represents the first real attempt in the LIS case. The automatic recognizer is based on Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and video features have been extracted using the OpenCV open source library. The effectiveness of the HMM system is validated by a comparative evaluation with Support Vector Machine approach. The video material used to train the recognizer and testing its performance consists in a database that the authors have deliberately created by involving 10 signers and 147 isolated-sign videos for each signer. The database is publicly available. Computer simulations have shown the effectiveness of the adopted methodology, with recognition accuracies comparable to those obtained by the automatic tools developed for other sign languages.

What supports deaf signers advantage over nonsigners on visuospatial short-term memory (STM) tasks is still a matter of debate. We compared the performance of 18 deaf Italian Sign Language (LIS) users with that of a matched group of Italian hearing nonsigners in three different tasks: two versions of the Corsi Block test, namely span forward and span backward, and the Visual Pattern Test (VPT). Although the Corsi forward and backward are dynamic and mainly involve a spatial component, the VPT is static and taps primarily the visual component of STM. Signers significantly outperformed nonsigners on both versions of the Corsi Block test, whereas they performed significantly worse on the VPT. We suggest that the source of the different pattern lies in the static nature of the VPT versus the dynamic nature of the Corsi spans. © The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

To address the negative effects of deafness on spoken language acquisition, many clinicians suggest using cochlear implant (CI) and oral education and advise against sign language, even when combined with spoken language (i.e., bilingualism), believing that it may slow down spoken language development. In a deaf child with CI who was exposed at an early age to Italian Sign Language and spoken Italian, we evaluated language development and the relationship between the two languages. The number of words/signs produced by the child consistently increased with age, and the vocabulary growth rate in spoken Italian was equivalent to that of hearing peers. Before CI, the child relied almost exclusively on sign language; after CI, he gradually shifted to spoken Italian yet still used sign language when unable to retrieve words in spoken Italian. We conclude that bimodal bilingualism may scaffold the development of spoken language also in deaf children with CI.

We argue that some sign language loci (i.e. positions in signing space that realize discourse referents) are both formal variables and simplified representations of what they denote; in other words, they are simultaneously logical symbols and pictorial representations. We develop a 'formal semantics with iconicity' that accounts for their dual life; the key idea ('formal iconicity') is that some geometric properties of signs must be preserved by the interpretation function. We analyze in these terms three kinds of iconic effects in American and French Sign Language (ASL and LSF): (i) structural iconicity, where relations of inclusion and complementation among loci are directly reflected in their denotations; (ii) locus-external iconicity, where the high or low position of a locus in signing space has a direct semantic reflex, akin to the semantic contribution of gender features of pronouns; and (iii) locus-internal iconicity, where different parts of a structured locus are targeted by different directional verbs, as was argued by Liddell and Kegl. The resulting semantics combines insights of two traditions that have been sharply divided by recent debates. In line with the 'formalist camp' (e.g. Lillo-Martin and Klima, Neidle, and Sandler and Lillo-Martin), our theory treats loci as variables, and develops an explicit formal analysis of their behavior. But we also incorporate insights of the 'iconic camp', which emphasized the role of iconic constraints in sign language in general and in pronominals in particular (e.g. Cuxac, Taub, Liddell). However, this synthesis is only possible if formal semantics makes provisions for iconic requirements at the very core of its interpretive procedure. (An Appendix discusses relevant data from Italian Sign Language [LIS].)

International audience

The present study examined whether full access to sign language as a medium for instruction could influence performance in Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks. Three groups of Italian participants (age range: 6-14 years) participated in the study: Two groups of deaf signing children and one group of hearing-speaking children. The two groups of deaf children differed only in their school environment: One group attended a school with a teaching assistant (TA; Sign Language is offered only by the TA to a single deaf child), and the other group attended a bilingual program (Italian Sign Language and Italian). Linguistic abilities and understanding of false belief were assessed using similar materials and procedures in spoken Italian with hearing children and in Italian Sign Language with deaf children. Deaf children attending the bilingual school performed significantly better than deaf children attending school with the TA in tasks assessing lexical comprehension and ToM, whereas the performance of hearing children was in between that of the two deaf groups. As for lexical production, deaf children attending the bilingual school performed significantly better than the two other groups. No significant differences were found between early and late signers or between children with deaf and hearing parents.

It is widely known that supranational institutions and organizations, like the United Nations and the European Commission, encouraged national governments to recognize national sign languages as the languages of their Deaf communities. Nonetheless, Italy has not yet recognized Italian Sign Language (LIS) as the official language of the Deaf community in Italy. At present, a number of proposals are still awaiting discussion by the Italian Parliament, which has postponed consideration of them for many years. Despite the general unconcern for LIS at the highest levels of national political institutions, local governments provide help and financial support for local integration projects, especially those involving deaf children. Within this institutional picture, LIS is quite viable and visible throughout the country. For instance, national TV news broadcasts are interpreted several times every day (by both public and private broadcasting corporations), and messages in LIS are commonly used to inform Deaf people of major events (such as national and regional elections and national referenda). Furthermore, signers may have an interpreter when asked to be present in court for trials. Moreover, the main Deaf organization, namely, Ente Nazionale Sordi, which is widespread in Italy, actively collaborates with both local and national institutions, especially to promote the use of LIS by deaf and hearing children in bilingual school programs. Ente Nazionale Sordi (ENS) also provides language courses for hearing adults who are interested in LIS and for interpreters who want specialized instruction. In this article, we describe the current situation of the Italian Deaf community and the status of its sign language. Starting with the latest national law on language minorities (482/1999), we explain some of the reasons that LIS has not yet been recognized as the official language of the Italian Deaf community. We then focus on some of the most relevant initiatives entertained by local governments, ENS, and universities in order to strengthen LIS and make it more visible to the hearing community. Since a lack of standardization might partly explain why LIS has not yet been recognized, we disentangle this issue by illustrating some interesting results of a recent sociolinguistic investigation. The picture that we draw shows that LIS is ready to be officially designated as the language of the Italian Deaf community.

This article summarizes early approaches to sociolinguistic research and the factors that condition variation in sign languages. The article then examines the methodological issues that arise in the study of sign languages before discussing recent research on variation in several different sign languages and dialects including Black ASL, Australian Sign Language, New Zealand Sign Language, and Italian Sign Language. This research shows that sign languages, like spoken languages, are subject to a wide range of internal and external constraints, some of which are particular to sign languages. We conclude with suggestions for future research.

Sign languages display remarkable crosslinguistic consistencies in the use of handshapes. In particular, handshapes used in classifier predicates display a consistent pattern in finger complexity: classifier handshapes representing objects display more finger complexity than those representing how objects are handled. Here we explore the conditions under which this morphophonological phenomenon arises. In Study 1, we ask whether hearing individuals in Italy and the United States, asked to communicate using only their hands, show the same pattern of finger complexity found in the classifier handshapes of two sign languages: Italian Sign Language (LIS) and American Sign Language (ASL). We find that they do not: gesturers display more finger complexity in handling handshapes than in object handshapes. The morphophonological pattern found in conventional sign languages is therefore not a codified version of the pattern invented by hearing individuals on the spot. In Study 2, we ask whether continued use of gesture as a primary communication system results in a pattern that is more similar to the morphophonological pattern found in conventional sign languages or to the pattern found in gesturers. Homesigners have not acquired a signed or spoken language and instead use a self-generated gesture system to communicate with their hearing family members and friends. We find that homesigners pattern more like signers than like gesturers: their finger complexity in object handshapes is higher than that of gesturers (indeed as high as signers); and their finger complexity in handling handshapes is lower than that of gesturers (but not quite as low as signers). Generally, our findings indicate two markers of the phonologization of handshape in sign languages: increasing finger complexity in object handshapes, and decreasing finger complexity in handling handshapes. These first indicators of phonology appear to be present in individuals developing a gesture system without benefit of a linguistic community. Finally, we propose that iconicity, morphology, and phonology each play an important role in the system of sign language classifiers to create the earliest markers of phonology at the morphophonological interface.

FOLLOWING A WELL-ESTABLISHED tradition going back to the 1980s (cf. Volterra 1987/2004), we use the name Lingua dei Segni Italiana (Italian Sign Language [LIS]) for the language used by Italian deaf people (and by Swiss deaf people living in the Ticino canton). In addition, LIS is becoming more and more visible, and its status as a minority language in the general Italian community is growing stronger due to various reasons. On the one hand, the research has shown that LIS, as other sign languages, exhibits all of the fundamental linguistic properties of natural languages: It can convey the same range of meanings and has a natural history, as spoken languages do. In particular, its phonology, morphology, and syntax are as complex as those of spoken languages like Italian.1 These facts about LIS are becoming established outside the community of sign language users partly due to the fact that a LIS program is offered by one university (Ca' Foscari Venice), and courses in LIS are now taught in various universities around the country. Another fact that is strengthening the status of LIS is that national television channels are now required to broadcast some news programs with LIS interpreting, making LIS visible to the larger population. Still, LIS has not yet received formal recognition by the Italian authorities, although various bills are sitting in the Italian parliament for the recognition of LIS as a minority language. This lack of formal recognition has serious consequences (e.g., in the educational system). Deaf children are now generally mainstreamed, and there is no guarantee that LIS will be used in their education. Interpreting, not to mention bilingual/bimodal education, is still the exception rather than the rule. In general, LIS is rarely used in institutional settings and is mostly used in private exchanges and informal gatherings. Given this scenario, it is not surprising that existing research on LIS reflects an impressive degree of variation. Still, a comprehensive sociolinguistic study of LIS varieties used around the country has not been systematically carried out until recently. This article describes an extensive collection of data from ten cities with 165 signers, which at the time of writing had just been concluded and reports on some of the data emerging from the LIS corpus resulting from this collection. Initial plans to build a systematic corpus for LIS were made in 2006 thanks to the input of Ceil Lucas, whose contribution was essential for the collection of the ASL corpus (cf. Lucas, Bayley, and Valli 2001). Lucas approached some of the Italian researchers who were working on LIS and discussed with them the guidelines of a research project that would reproduce (with some important differences) the methodology of data collection used for ASL. Adam Schembri, who worked on a corpus for AUSLAN and BSL, and Robert Bayley were also consulted in this preliminary phase. Three universities (Venice, Milan-Bicocca, and Rome- La Sapienza) joined their efforts and applied to the Italian Ministry of University for a grant. The grant proposal (PRIN 2007 project, "Dimensions of Variation in Italian Sign Language") was approved (with some delay) in September 2008, so the actual data collection began in February 2009. Data collection in most cities took place in 2009, although data from two cities (Catanzaro and Milan) were collected in 2010. This article is organized as follows: In the following section we describe the general methodological issues we faced when planning the data collection and which motivated our choice of cities and participants. Then we describe the specific elicitation methods we adopted. After that, we describe in detail both the lexical variations we encountered and the results of the statistical analyses carried out on this part of the corpus. Finally, we present our conclusions. Building the LIS Corpus: Choosing Cities and Participants When we initially planned to build a LIS corpus on which we (and other researchers) could run statistical analyses to explore the sociolinguistics of LIS, we faced two problems. …

A picture naming task, the Boston Naming Test, originally developed for spoken language, has been adapted to Italian Sign Language in order to assess the vocabulary of Italian deaf signing children. Thirty deaf and thirty hearing children and adolescents (aged 6–14 years) participated in the study. In the deaf signing group, half of the children attended a bilingual school. Results show no significant differences between deaf and hearing participants in the number of correct responses provided, but do show interesting differences in the lexical accuracy observed for individual items and in error types reported for sign and speech. In the deaf group, children attending a bilingual school performed significantly better than those who did not attend a bilingual programme.

Sign Bilingualism: Language Development, Interaction, and Maintenance in Sign Language Contact Situations, ed. Carolina Plaza-Pust and Esperanza Morales-Lopez (Philadelphia: Benjamins, 2008, 389 pp., hardcover, $158.00, ISBN 978-90-272-4149-8) THE EDITORS of this volume have put together twelve papers under the tide Sign Bilingualism. The papers cover a variety of topics, including code mixing in Li acquisition, language planning and its impact on interpreters, language contact in the development of writing, and the correlation between the use of space in sign language and reading comprehension. I would recommend to potential readers (and they should be numerous!) to start reading the book from the back. In the final chapter, Plaza-Pust and Morales-Lopez do an excellent job of introducing the relevant concepts of sign bilingualism, language maintenance and planning, and language contact. Drawing on previous studies in both spoken and signed languages, they show connections to the studies presented in this volume, bridge the diverse topics presented in the other eleven chapters, and demonstrate the relevance of linking theory and practice. Plaza-Pust and Morales-Lopez hope that "the knowledge that can be gleaned from each of the chapters in this volume also contributes to a more dynamic relationship between the research-policy-practice axis that determines sign bilingualism and its perception in the broader social context" (372). And indeed, the contributions to this volume illustrate the range of research on linguistic structures and their impact on language policies and also advise practitioners on putting research into practice. This "course," which is offered as dessert, in this reviewer's opinion, ought to be instead a tantalizing appetizer. The first course offering by Baker and van der Bogaerde (1-28) discusses the code mixing in the input to and the output from children. It is a significant contribution in understanding the natural interactions within families that comprise both deaf and hearing members. Their results show that deaf children receive significantly less code blending in their input from their deaf mothers and also use less in their own utterances. Differences appear in the types of code blends, with hearing children producing and receiving far more blends with Dutch as the base language, while the deaf children in the study receive and produce almost exclusively blends with NGT as their base language. Baker and van der Bogaerde also note that the most commonly blended word classes are nouns, verbs, and adjectives, results that contradict previous studies on code blending in both deaf and hearing adults (Emmorey el al. 2005; Muysken 2004). If we consider Baker and van der Bogaerde's chapter a first course, the next section of the book could serve as the main courses. As most of the contributions in this volume are concerned with bilingualism in the context of deaf education, this is the core of the book. The chapter by Ardito et al. (137-64) stands out because it discusses practical applications of bilingual education. The authors describe in great detail activities in a bilingual kindergarten class aimed at increasing appreciation of and competence in literacy. Ardito et al. give a brief but useful introduction to bilingualism and early literacy. The remainder of the chapter describes the principles, methods, and successes of team teaching reading to a mixed group of hearing and deaf children using Italian Sign Language and Signed Italian. This chapter in particular will be of interest to educators looking for concrete advice on how to put what we know about sign bilingualism into practice. Educators and researchers will appreciate Krausneker's report (195-222) on the language use and awareness of deaf and hearing children in a bilingual classroom in Austria. After situating her research within the larger context of Austrian deaf educational and societal policies, Krausneker elaborates the findings of her longitudinal study of the use of OGS and German in a mixed class of hearing and deaf students. …

This study examines the developmental routes by which gesture is codified into a linguistic system in the context of the natural signed languages of the deaf. I suggest that gestures follow two routes as they codify, and thus that signed languages provide evidence of how material which begins its developmental life external to the conventional linguistic system, as spontaneous or conventional gestures, is codified as language. The Italian Sign Language modal form ‘impossible’ is studied in detail, exploring the developmental route that led from Roman gestures, through liturgical gestures as depicted in medieval Italian art, through everyday Italian and Neapolitan gestures to its modal meaning.

The aim of this study is to provide a detailed account for the phenomenon of movement epenthesis in Italian Sign Language (LIS). LIS displays at least two cases of epenthesis of movement, one affecting signs that involve contact with the body, the other affecting signs that do not (i.e. signs articulated in neutral space). The two cases of epenthesis of movement receive a unified analysis, once the mechanism of selection of the plane of articulation is spelled out. The general phenomenon of movement epenthesis is captured by a formal approach within a constraint-based framework, such as the one developed first for American Sign Language (ASL) in Brentari (1998). Cases of movement epenthesis in ASL will be discussed and compared to cases of LIS epenthesis

In Italian Sign Language (LIS), when past or future time adverbs are present, the signs for verbs exhibit the same manual configurations whether the sentence reports a past event or a future event. Facts of this kind, also observed for American Sign Language (ASL) and other sign languages, have led some authors (Friedman, among others) to conclude that these languages, on a par with spoken languages like Chinese, lack grammatical tense. Neidle et al. and Jacobowitz and Stokoe have challenged this view for ASL and have argued that ASL sentences contain tense markers. I present some data showing that LIS verbs inflect for tense. I argue, moreover, that the apparent lack of tense inflection when LIS past and future time adverbs are present is due to the fact that these adverbs shift the s-point and that LIS past and future tenses are absolute tenses. I provide a formal account of the LIS tense system based on these assumptions. The account is implemented in Heim’s analysis of tense.

The occurrence of WH -items at the right edge of the sentence, while extremely rare in spoken languages, is quite common in sign languages. In particular, in sign languages like LIS (Italian Sign Language) WH -items cannot be positioned at the left edge. We argue that existing accounts of right-peripheral occurrences of WH -items are empirically inadequate and provide no clue as to why sign languages and spoken languages differ in this respect. We suggest that the occurrence of WH -items at the right edge of the sentence in sign languages be taken at face value: in these languages, WH -phrases undergo rightward movement. Based on data from LIS, we argue that this is due to the fact that WH-NONMANUAL MARKING (NMM) marks the dependency between an interrogative complementizer and the position that the WH -phrase occupies before it moves. The hypothesis that NMM can play this role also accounts for the spreading of negative NMM with LIS negative quantifiers. We discuss how our analysis can be extended to ASL (American Sign Language) and IPSL (Indo-Pakistani Sign Language). Our account is spelled out in the principles-and-parameters framework. In the last part of the article, we relate our proposal to recent work on prosody in spoken languages showing that WH -dependencies can be prosodically marked in spoken languages. Overt movement and prosodic marking of the WH -dependency do not normally cooccur in spoken languages, while they are possible in sign languages. We propose that this is due to the fact that sign languages, unlike spoken languages, are multidimensional.

In analyses of the grammatical structure of sign languages (Liddell, 2003), “classifier forms” which play a major role in these spatialised grammars, are looked upon as a “gestural” component of sign language. Kendon (2004) pointed out that some of the organizational principles of co-verbal gesturing can be compared to “classifiers” in sign languages. In this paper drawing on previous analyses of LIS (Italian Sign Language) metaphors in discourse (Russo, 2004a, 2005) the role of “classifier forms” in SL metaphors is examined and compared with some aspects of gestural metaphors produced during academic lectures in Italian. It is shown that similarities and differences between the two communicative devices can be pointed out only if the multimodal organization of both face-to-face speech activity and face-to-face sign language communication is taken into account. The gestural actions produced by speakers and the non-manual gestures produced by signers are interpreted as framing a speech act unit in this way providing a perspective for the interpretation of the lexical items within it. The distinction between langue and parole proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure (1916) is discussed and reframed by this analysis.

The present study investigates the nature of mouth actions in Italian Sign Language (LIS) and shows how the manual and the oral modality can be integrated when the visual-gestural channel is chosen for communication. Finally, the role played by mouth actions in sign language will be investigated and paralleled to co-speech gestures by re-working Kendon’s continuum in order to show how orality could become gestural when co-occurring with signing.

This investigation examined whether access to sign language as a medium for instruction influences theory of mind (ToM) reasoning in deaf children with similar home language environments. Experiment 1 involved 97 deaf Italian children ages 4-12 years: 56 were from deaf families and had LIS (Italian Sign Language) as their native language, and 41 had acquired LIS as late signers following contact with signers outside their hearing families. Children receiving bimodal/bilingual instruction in LIS together with Sign-Supported and spoken Italian significantly outperformed children in oralist schools in which communication was in Italian and often relied on lipreading. Experiment 2 involved 61 deaf children in Estonia and Sweden ages 6-16 years. On a wide variety of ToM tasks, bilingually instructed native signers in Estonian Sign Language and spoken Estonian succeeded at a level similar to age-matched hearing children. They outperformed bilingually instructed late signers and native signers attending oralist schools. Particularly for native signers, access to sign language in a bilingual environment may facilitate conversational exchanges that promote the expression of ToM by enabling children to monitor others' mental states effectively.

Studies available have described several specific issues affecting healthcare accessibility by deaf people, but to date, no research has reported the experience of deaf patients with in-hospital communication. The aim of the study was to explore the communication experience of deaf patients with regard to their in-hospital stay. A purposeful sample of participants was selected. The data collection process was based on a focus group. The focus groups were conducted in Italian sign language and videorecorded; subsequently, the entire conversation was faithfully transcribed. A qualitative content analysis of the transcription was performed and the findings are reported using the Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research approach. Four themes have emerged: (a) experiencing a common vulnerability: the need for reciprocal understanding and sensitivity, (b) being outside the comfort zone: feeling discriminated against once again, (c) perceiving a lack of consonance between care and needs and (d) developing a sense of progressively disempowerment. The experience of deaf individuals during their in-hospital stay may be critical: they are exposed to protracted communication and interaction with healthcare providers and an environment that is not prepared and designed for these vulnerable patients. Two levels of strategies should be identified, implemented and developed to increase the quality of communication with deaf people during hospitalisation, both at the hospital/health system level and at the healthcare professional/clinical level.

1. Introduction (by Rutkowski, Pawel) 2. Gettin' together a POSSe: The primacy of predication in ASL possessives (by Abner, Natasha) 3. WH-duplication in Italian Sign Language (LIS) (by Branchini, Chiara) 4. PERSON climbing up a tree: (and other adventures in sign language grammaticalization) (by Pfau, Roland) 5. The point of agreement: Changing how we think about sign language, gesture, and agreement (by Wilbur, Ronnie B.) 6. Subject index

In all sign languages (SLs) studied to date, negation can be expressed by manual negative signs and by non-manual markers (mostly a headshake). The way these two types of markers interact, however, has been shown to be subject to cross-linguistic variation. In particular, in some SLs, the use of a manual negator is obligatory (e.g. Turkish SL, Italian SL), while in others, clauses are commonly negated by means of a non-manual marker only (e.g. German SL). Moreover, within both groups, some SLs allow for Negative Concord (NC) involving manual negators while others do not. We offer an account of the attested variation within a model that reduces typological differences in the area of sentential negation to differences in feature values associated with negative elements (Zeijlstra 2004). Applying Zeijlstra’s three-way typological distinction, we argue that German SL is a Strict NC language while Turkish SL can be classified as a Non-strict NC language. We further discuss the possibility that Italian SL exemplifies the third type, a Double Negation (DN) language, but conclude that this analysis is faced with empirical problems and that a SL of the DN type is yet to be identified.

This paper presents the prototype and the preliminary evaluation of an automatic translation system developed in the LIS4ALL project. The system domain is the corpus of railway station announcements in Italian. The output of the system is a 3D animated avatar that signs announcements in Italian Sign Language. The preliminary evaluation, which measures the accuracy of the translations at the sentence level, relies through the BLEU-RAC4 metric, a variant of the traditional BLEU metric used to evaluate Machine Translation, specifically designed for sentence level evaluation. The aim of the evaluation is to compare the LIS4ALL translation outputs with the human counterparts.

CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS INVOLVE a structure-preserving mapping between a concrete domain of thought (the source domain) and an abstract domain of thought (the target domain) (Lakoff and Turner 1989; LakofF and Johnson 1999). They are grounded in our everyday experience and are fundamental to our conception of the world (LakofF and Johnson 1980, 1999). The past two decades have brought a groundswell of interest in and research on metaphors in sign languages. Research conducted on American Sign Language (e.g., Boyes-Braem 1981; Grushkin 1998; Holtemann 1990; Taub 2001; Wilbur 1987; P. Wilcox 1993, 2000), British Sign Language (e.g., Brennan 1990), and Italian Sign Language (e.g., Russo 2000), among others, constitutes comprehensive efforts to show the pervasiveness of conceptual metaphors in sign languages. However, whereas metaphorical linguistic expressions in spoken language consist of one mapping, metaphorical items in sign languages use two mappings (Holtemann 1990; Taub 2001; P. Wilcox 1993). Numerous signs for abstract concepts-ideas, emotions, communication, and so on-incorporate a visual image of a concrete thing or activity. That is, in order to name or describe abstract concepts metaphorically, sign languages use a large array of iconic linguistic items for concrete shapes, locations, and movements. Boyes-Braem (1981) refers to these as "morphophonemic primes," Brennan (1990) as "visual metaphors," and Taub (2001) as "iconic image-schematic items." For example, COMPRENDRE ("to understand") in Catalan Sign Language gives a visual depiction of communication as objects moving from one person to another. Jarque (1999) argues that the domains of communicating ideas and throwing objects are linked for the LSC signer. An idea corresponds to an object; telling or explaining the idea corresponds to throwing the object to someone; and understanding the idea corresponds to catching the object. Brennan postulates the special relevance of iconicity: "The strong intuition that even signs with highly abstract referents show some link between form and meaning is given support once we realize that metaphorical relationships can operate across a wide range of meanings" (1990, 24-25). In cognitive linguistics, iconicity is characterized as a mapping between certain formal features of the expression of a sign (or a sublexical component of the sign) and some features of the meaning of this sign (or a sublexical component) or, as S. Wilcox (1999) points out, between our mental conceptions of a linguistic item's form and its meaning. According to Taub (2001, 67) and S. Wilcox (1999), iconicity in sign languages is based on the following: * OUR PERCEPTION OF HANDS, ARMS, AND FINGERS AS HAVING SHAPES, LOCATIONS, AND MOVEMENT * OUR ABILITY TO CONSTRUE SHAPES FROM THE PATH THAT A MOVING OBJECT TRACES IN SPACE * OUR KNOWLEDGE THAT A SIGNER'S BODY IS A HUMAN BODY * OUR ABILITY TO REORGANIZE THE BODY MOVEMENTS THAT GO ALONG WITH PARTICULAR ACTIVITIES * OUR PERCEPTION THAT BODY GESTURES TAKE PLACE IN TIME AND SPACE * OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE MOVEMENTS OF SIGNING ITSELF Taub provides a general framework and a set of tools for the precise description, modeling, and analysis of iconic linguistic items-the "analogue-building" model of iconicity. Specifically, she points out that metaphorical signs are shaped by two mappings: a metaphorical one from concrete to abstract conceptual domains and an iconic one between the concrete source domain and the linguistic forms that represent it (2001, 97). The target domain is presented using an iconic depiction of the source domain. For example, consider the LSC linguistic expression COMPRENDRE mentioned earlier. Table 1 sets out the correspondences between articulators, source, and target domains. The dominant hand displays a spread open 5 handshape (HS), and the palm orientation (PO), facing the addressee's locus, closes to an S handshape and moves toward the signer. …

COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS EMBRACES a powerful notion of conceptual embodiment that reveals metaphoric creativity in spoken and signed languages. Since Aristotle's time and until fairly recently, metaphors have been thought of as flowery frills that emerge as colorful expressions in our daily language. Traditionally, metaphors were considered to be tropes or figures of speech and were to be avoided for argumentation purposes since they were "nonliteral" (Centner and Jeziorski 1993, 448). More recently, however, metaphor has been recognized as a systematic conceptual thought process, or, as Lakoff and Johnson view it, "metaphor means metaphorical concept" (2003, 6). Their research has helped to generate a body of work showing that metaphor is "shaped to a significant extent by the common nature of our bodies and the shared ways that we all function in the everyday world" (ibid., 245). Although there are fundamental differences in defining metaphor (Stern 2000; Dirven and Porings 2002; Kittay 1987), LakofTand Johnson's contemporary experiential theory provides a strong basis for understanding the cross-domain mappings discussed in this article. Jakel argues for the metaphorical concept of mind in a cognitive model by asserting that "most of the structure of our model of mental activity is supplied by two extremely productive image schemata: the 'container' schema and the 'manipulation' schema'" (1995, 219). Two metaphors entrenched in spoken English as well as American Sign Language (ASL) are MIND is A CONTAINER and IDEAS ARE OBJECTS. Metaphorical mapping operates on these two conceptual metaphors in a way that permits us to conceive of our brains as containers filled with mental items. We cannot literally move thoughts or ideas, but we can visualize them as objects, and physical objects in our surroundings can be manipulated and moved. Conversely, ideas take on a metaphorical frame by being moved conceptually in our minds. Ordinary language behavior in ASL reveals parallel cognitive structures that are both similar to and different from spoken-language behavior. This article focuses on the metaphorical similarities between English and ASL that are found in the metaphors MIND is A CONTAINER and IDEAS ARE OBJECTS. We also look at the differences in metaphor conceptualization that can be demonstrated through UNDERSTANDING is GRASPING, a countervailing metaphor that is commonly mapped in English but is not prevalently found in ASL. Several other languages that evoke UNDERSTANDING is GRASPING are discussed, including British Sign Language (BSL), Catalan Sign Language (LSC), Italian Sign Language (LIS), and, to a certain extent, French Sign Language (LSF).1 Iconic Brain and Metaphorical Brain In ASL, handshapes lend themselves to metaphorical constructs through their phonological forms and productive morphemes. The handshape icons not only reveal iconicity that is prevalent in spoken languages (Armstrong 1983; Bybee 1985; Fauconnier 1985; Langacker 1991; Givon 1991; Haiman 1985) but also use the corresponding movements to add visual images to the linguistic spectrum. ASL phonemes and morphemes are isomorphic, with corresponding handshapes having the same appearance of form.2 However, it is important to distinguish between iconic and metaphoric conceptual relationships. For example, an isomorphic use of two cupped hands can show, through mimetic behavior, the brain of a person who was killed in a car accident. The cupped hands indicate the approximate size of the victim's brain and skull. The purely isomorphic imitation of the skull that is flapped up and off of a victim's brain represents the approximation between the size and shape of the hands and the skull in question. On the other hand, a metaphorical skull shows the physical source and abstract target schema that are evoked when using the same handshape combination just described. This second case of iconicity is identified in a situation that occurred when a consultant described seeing a few deaf friends teasing each other at a party. …

A KEY DEFINITIONAL FEATURE of metaphors is that they make it possible to talk about a particular topic with terms usually related to a very different subject. For example, if someone says, "Jerry's mental wheels are oiled," we understand that the person is talking about the mind of someone in terms that are usually used for talking about machines.1 Researchers in the contemporary theory of metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Fauconnier and Turner 2002) explain this phenomenon as the result of a cross-domain mapping between two different conceptual domains. To process the metaphor "Jerry's mental wheels are oiled," we need an understanding of some of the key properties of the mind's domain (the target of the metaphor) that our experience of the machine's domain (the source of the metaphor) can provide. In recent theoretical accounts of metaphors (Ortony 1979; Keysar and Glucksberg 1989; Turner and Fauconnier 1995), much effort has been devoted to determining which constraints limit and govern metaphorical cross-domain mappings (i.e., not every domain can be mapped onto every other, and some cross-domain mappings are perceived as meaningless). Context, cultural presuppositions, and universal human experiences play an important role in determining which domains can be mapped onto which others. According to Lakoffandjohnson (1999), metaphors are rooted in prelinguistic bodily experiences that lead children who are acquiring language to a conflation of different semantic and cognitive domains. From this point of view, different cultures construct different metaphors that stem from these same experiences. I argue that we can construe signed language metaphors as products of prelinguistic experiences that are probably universal for deaf people but do not completely overlap with those experienced by speakers of vocal languages. In addition, signed language metaphors can also be characterized as intrinsically related to aspects of the particular linguistic and cultural dimensions to which they belong in a particular Deaf community. I suggest that the shared cultural knowledge of Italian deaf signers plays a relevant role in the making and understanding of metaphoric cross-domain mappings in Italian Sign Language (LIS). Another important topic is the role that the iconic features of signs may play in metaphor production. In recent discussions of signed language metaphors, much attention has been devoted to the interplay of iconicity and metaphors (Brennan 1992; Russo 2000; Wilcox 2000; Taub 2001). Although iconic and metaphorical phenomena in signed languages must be given separate theoretical accounts, the interplay of iconicity and metaphors in signed language discourse has a key role in metaphor creation and understanding. Iconicity and Metaphor in Signed Languages Iconicity refers to a regular mapping of some of the formal features of the meaning of a sign (or of a sublexical component) onto some of the formal features of the expression of a sign (or sublexical component). This correspondence is generally inherent in the language system but can also be productively established in a set of utterances. It is possible to distinguish between two kinds of iconicity: frozen (dormant) and productive (dynamic) (Russo, Giuranna, and Pizzuto [2001]; Russo [2004]). Frozen iconicity affects the relations between form and meaning that can be found in the sublexical, lexical, and grammatical structures of signs when they are abstracted from a particular utterance and considered in their citation form. In signed language literature, this kind of iconicity has been much debated (Klima and Bellugi 1979; Boyes Braem 1981; Pizzuto and Volterra 2000; Pietrandrea 2002; Taub 2000, 2001). It has often been argued that the iconic features of the citation forms of signs do not contrast with the inherent linguistic character of signed languages. The second type, dynamic iconicity, affects the correlation between forms and meanings that can be established in particular utterances, according to a particular textual and situational context. …