The sign reasonobligatorilyintroduces reason clauses in LIS. However, there is another way to express causality in LIS and this involves the underspecified interrogative sign qartichoke discussed in SYNTAX 1.2.3.2 and illustrated in the following picture.
qartichoke
The following is an example of a sentence expressing causation and involving qartichoke.
car CL(closed 5): ‘car_bump_and_stop’ qartichoke engine_oil exhaust
‘Why did the car stop? Because the engine oil finished.’
However, the sign qartichoke does not play the role of introducing a subordinate clause in this structure, which is more akin to a question-answer pair (‘Why did the car stop? Because the engine oil finished’).
The sign glossed reason is very similar to the wh-sign corresponding to ‘why’, glossed as why. Note that the manual parameters are the same, however the two signs differ in terms of absence/presence of specific non-manuals. The sign reason introducing a reason clause is articulated with neutral facial expressions (a), whereas the sign interrogative pronoun why is obligatorily produced with the non-manuals typical of wh-questions (SYNTAX 1.2.3.1) (b).
a. reason
‘Because’
b. why
‘Why’
The reader should therefore be careful not to confuse the two signs. The following sentence shows the wh-sign why included in an interrogative sentence (‘Why did Maria leave the house?’) followed by the answer ‘to meet up with a friend’. That this sentence is a question-answer pair is indicated by the non-manual marking, namely lowered eye-brows (typical of wh-signs) spreading from the beginning to the sign why and raised eye-brows on the answer.
wh re
maria house go_out why. friend meet
‘Why did Maria leave the house? To meet up with a friend.’
Conversely, the sign reason fucntions as a subordinating conjunction introducing a subordinate reason clause. As shown in the example below, it is not accompanied by any special non-manual marking.
maria house go_out reason friend meet
‘Maria left the house to meet up with a friend.’