A Grammar of Italian Sign Language (LIS)

A major strategy to express the goal of an action in LIS is sequential, where the clause that expresses the goal follows the clause that expresses the main event. However, thanks to the availability of two manual articulators, the goal and the main event might be expressed simultaneously rather than sequentially. A hypothetical example is a situation where someone jumps in order to grasp a grape and, although the two actions temporally overlap, grasping is the goal of jumping. In this situation, in principle, in a classifier predicate construction (MORPHOLOGY 5.1) one hand might express the jumping action, while the other hand might simultaneously express the grasping action. Still, the sequential strategy seems to be preferred to the simultaneous strategy, as illustrated by the following example where the action of jumping and the action of grasping are expressed by the two hands one after the other.

         man_a ix_a grape 

         dom:    CL(V): ‘jump’

         n-dom: grasp

         ‘The man jumped to grasp the grapes.’

Further research is needed to understand if the preference for sequentiality when expressing the purpose of the action is limited to these types of examples or is more general, possibly expressing the fact that the goal is conceived as temporally coming after the event performed to reach it, even if the two events are simultaneous in reality.