A Grammar of Italian Sign Language (LIS)

In LIS, pointing is expressed with a manual sign directed toward an area in the signing space. A pointing sign may occur alone or together with another sign. In the former case, it fulfils a pronominal function (LEXICON 3.7), as shown in the example below, repeated for reason of clarity.

         woman CL(G): ‘woman_move’ ₃CL(V): ‘look_at’₁. ix₃ beautiful-int   

         ‘A woman is walking, and then she suddenly turns to me, she is very beautiful.’

In the second case, the pointing accompanies another sign, possibly functioning as a determiner (LEXICON 3.6) (SYNTAX 4.1), as shown in the example below.

         pope_a ix_aamerica south_{b a}fly_b    

         ‘The Pope flew to South America.’

It has been observed that the direction of eye gaze correlates with the demonstrative function. In particular, if the eye gaze is directed towards a referent, the signer indicates that the referent is physically present in the extra-linguistic context. However, the use of this marker is optional, as displayed in the example below, where no eye gaze occurs.

                                                               wh

         A:           ix₂ clothes buy what

         B:           ix₁ buy pe_a shirt ix_a

         ‘What type of dress did you buy?’ ‘I bought this very shirt.’