Italian Sign Language (LIS) Poetry: iconic properties and structural regularities
Temas
Detalles
It has been known for many years that Italian deaf signers possess a rich, albeit underground, “literary” tradition with poems, narrative and dramatized texts, and theatre performances expressed in Italian Sign Language (LIS) (Pizzuto 1986). However, chiefly because of the minority linguistic status of LIS and its lower sociolinguistic status compared to both standard Italian and the numerous spoken dialects used in Italy, this cultural tradition has remained largely unknown and unexplored until very recently (Pizzuto and Russo 2000). Research on the lexical, morphological, and morphosyntactic structure of LIS has focused primarily on individual signs occurring in their citation forms out of context, or on signed utterances and texts produced in ordinary prose.