NOUN MORPHOLOGY IN ITALIAN SIGN LANGUAGE (LIS)

It has been reported that in at least some sign languages such as ASL, nominal signs possess little or no inflectional morphology. Previous analyses of Italian Sign Language (LIS), have shown that LIS nouns exh ibit some inflectional properties, and these influence the behavior of verbs. Most of these data, however, were limited to one variety of LI S used in Palermo, Sicily. The purpose of the present paper is twofold : (1) to provide new data on LIS nominal morphology, extending our ana lyses to other varieties of LIS used in such different Italian cities as Rome and Trieste, and thus assessing the generalizability of previo us findings on the topic; (2) to explore whether there is any signific ant interaction between nominal morphology and classifier predicates. In order to achieve our objectives, we analyze and describe spontaneou s and elicited productions of nominal signs, and judgements of grammat ical acceptability given by native LIS signers over sentences containi ng different classes of nominal signs, in different contexts (with inf lecting/or noninflecting verbs; with classifier-predicates). Examining our findings in a cross-linguistic perspective, we then attempt to cl arify whether the data on LIS provide indications concerning the role of modality-specific vs. language-specific factors in shaping the lexi con and morphology of a particular sign language.