Mirko Santoro (CNRS, Paris)
Compounds in sign languages: The case of Italian and French Sign Language
In this talk, I investigate the domain of compounds in sign languages. Compounding has been documented as a key strategy to enrich the lexicon of sign languages even in situations of emergent sign languages. I address this topic with three main angles: typological/empirical, theoretical and experimental.
In the typological/empirical part, I offer a thorough description of compounds in two sign languages: Italian and French Sign Language (LIS and LSF). I offer a refined and more comprehensive typology of compounds, in which classifiers and simultaneous forms are also taken into account.
In the theoretical part, I provide a formal account of how to derive the whole typology of compounds found in LIS and LSF. I show i) that compounds can be derived in multiple ways depending on their morphosyntactic properties and ii) that morphosyntactic derivation is not the only process that affects the combinatorial options of compounding. Post-syntactic processes, especially linearization, have to have access to at least partial representations in order to distinguish between forms that have to be spelled out either sequentially or simultaneously.
In the experimental part, I investigate whether phonological reduction is a sufficient condition to identify compounds in SL.