A Grammar of Italian Sign Language (LIS)

A major strategy to express causation in LIS seems to be sequential, with the clause that expresses the causer event following the clause that expresses the caused event. However, thanks to the availability of two manual articulators, in principle the causer event and the caused event can be expressed simultaneously rather than sequentially. In fact, the simultaneous strategy can be used in classifier predicates (MORPHOLOGY 5.1), as in the following example where the dominant hand describes the fall of the man and the non-dominant hand describes the fall of the motorbike.

         motorbike_a man_b

         dom:    CL(V): ‘move_to_a’ CL(V): ‘ride_bike’ CL(V): ‘man_fall’

         n-dom: CL(3): ‘be_at_a’       CL(3): ‘ride_bike’  CL(3): ‘bike_fall’

         ‘The man got on the motorbike, he rode it for a while until he fell off from it.’

However, an important proviso is necessary here. Although the classifier predicate can be used to describe a situation where a man falls because his motorbike does, its meaning is less specific than this. For example, a translation like ‘The man got on the motorbike and rode it. The man and motorbike both fell’ cannot be excluded. Therefore, classifier predicates cannot be considered structures specialized for causation.

         We can conclude that the presence of a structure dedicated to the expression of causation (the clause introduced by the sign reason) does not prevent the language to express causation in other forms, including classifier predicates and question-answer pairs with the interrogative signs corresponding to ‘why’.