A Grammar of Italian Sign Language (LIS)

A Grammar of Italian Sign Language (LIS) is a comprehensive presentation of the grammatical properties of LIS. It has been conceived as a tool for students, teachers, interpreters, the Deaf community, researchers, linguists and whoever is interested in the study of LIS. It is one output of the Horizon 2020 SIGN-HUB project. It is composed of six Parts: Part 1 devoted to the social and historical background in which the language has developed, and five Parts covering the main properties of Phonology, Lexicon, Morphology, Syntax and Pragmatics. Thanks to the electronic format of the grammar, text and videos are highly interconnected and are designed to fit the description of a visual language

Introduction

This volume includes selected and adapted papers from The Romance Turn VII, held in Venice on October 1-3, 2015. As for previous edi-tions, the conference brought together researchers from across Europe and overseas with the aim of communicating results and developing further research in the acquisition of Romance languages. The selected papers focus on a broad range of topics which are at the heart of the current debate on language acquisition (clitic pro-nouns, left-dislocations, passives, relative clauses, wh-questions) in a number of different acquisition settings: L1 and L2 acquisition, bilin-gualism, typical and atypical development. In addition to syntax, the volume covers other modules of grammar: semantics, pragmatics, and phonology, and adds a perspective on language processing to the cur-rent discussion on the acquisition of Romance languages. It mainly focuses on Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Romanian, in a compara-tive perspective with other Romance languages (Catalan, European Portuguese, French, Spanish) and languages of other language families (English, German, Persian, Sesotho, Turkish, etc.). One contribution on bilinguals with Greek as one of the two languages opens a perspective on a Balkan non-Romance language which may be interesting to be compared with Romanian

Assessing lexicalism through bimodal eyes

The relation holding between words and syntax is at the core of a lively debate. Two competing proposals have been advanced: the lexicalist view, claiming that the lexicon and the syntax are distinct modules of the grammar, and what we shall refer to as the constructionist view typically represented by models like Distributed Morphology, advocating for the redundancy of a notion such as the lexicon and arguing for no divide between syntax and word formation. By facing the debate from the privileged point of view of the mixed production of bimodal bilinguals (Italian - Italian Sign Language), namely users of a sign and a vocal language simultaneously produced, we discuss the interaction of the two grammars at play with respect to their word order, morphology and phonology and draw some consequences relevant to the debate

Typology in sign languages: Can it be predictive?

In this paper we propose a typological classification for sign languages handshape preference that is implicational; specifically, knowing some properties of handshape behavior in nouns makes predictions about other aspects of the grammar. To be concrete, noun forms in one group of sign languages show a preference for Object handshapes, while another group shows a preference for Handling handshapes. The analysis that we will present shows that membership in one or the other of these groups predicts the particular ways that nouns are distinguished from verbs, as well as the behavior of some classifier constructions. This work suggests that typology can be employed as powerful a tool in explaining crosslinguistic variation in sign languages

Environmental awareness gained during a citizen science project in touristic resorts is maintained after 3 years since participation

The research leading to these results has received funding from Project AWARE Foundation, ASTOI Association, Milano, Ministry of Tourism of the Arab Republic of Egypt, Settemari S. p. A Tour Operator, Scuba Nitrox Safety International, Viaggio nel Blu Diving Center.Tourism is one of the largest economic sectors in the world. It has a positive effect on the economy of many countries, but it can also lead to negative impacts on local ecosystems. Informal environmental education through Citizen Science (CS) projects can be effective in increasing citizen environmental knowledge and awareness in the short-term. A change of awareness could bring to a behavioral change in the long-term, making tourism more sustainable. However, the long-term effects of participating in CS projects are still unknown. This is the first follow-up study concerning the effects of participating in a CS project on cognitive and psychological aspects at the basis of pro-environmental behavior. An environmental education program was developed, between 2012 and 2013, in a resort in Marsa Alam, Egypt. The study directly evaluated, through paper questionnaires, the short-term (after 1 week or 10 days) retention of knowledge and awareness of volunteers that had participated in the activities proposed by the program. After three years, participants were re-contacted via email to fill in the same questionnaire as in the short-term study, plus a new section with psychological variables. 40.5% of the re-contacted participants completed the follow-up questionnaires with a final sample size of fifty-five people for this study. Notwithstanding the limited sample size, positive trends in volunteer awareness, personal satisfaction regarding the CS project, and motivation to engage in pro-environmental behavior in the long-term were observed.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

b-tagging in DELPHI at LEP

Abstract: The standard method used for tagging b-hadrons in the DELPHI experiment at the CERN LEP Collider is discussed in detail. The main ingredient of b-tagging is the impact parameters of tracks, which relies mostly on the vertex detector. Additional information, such as the mass of particles associated to a secondary vertex, significantly improves the selection efficiency and the background suppression. The paper describes various discriminating variables used for the tagging and the procedure of their combination. In addition, applications of b-tagging to some physics analyses, which depend crucially on the performance and reliability of b-tagging, are described briefly

Grammatica della lingua dei segni italiana (LIS)

Grammatica della lingua dei segni italiana è la prima grammatica di riferimento digitale della lingua dei segni italiana in italiano. Offre una descrizione approfondita della lingua nei domini della fonologia, morfologia, lessico, sintassi e pragmatica ed è corredata da testo, immagini e file video degli esempi proposti

On Relativization and Clefting. An Analysis of Italian Sign Language

This work is a contribution to our understanding of relativization strategies and clefting in Italian Sign Language, and more broadly, to our understanding of these constructions in world languages by setting the discussion on the theories that have been proposed in the literature of spoken languages to derive the syntactic phenomena object of investigation

Relative clauses. Theoretical perspectives

The lack, in many cases, of functional markers introducing relative clauses makes their identification difficult in sign languages. However, pioneering studies show that modality-specific features like non-manual markers are commonly employed to unambiguously mark relative clauses, and that sign languages exhibit the same syntactic and semantic typologies of relativization observed for spoken languages. Furthermore, syntactic tests and prosodic markers such as eye blink, head nod, and pauses signaling phrase boundaries are used as diagnostics to investigate the hierarchical relation holding between the relative clause and the main clause and to disentangle core properties of relative constructions. In some cases, the evidence gathered from sign languages provides a better understanding of constructions for which no agreement has been reached in the literature on spoken languages, like, for instance, non-restrictive relative clauses

Mixed Utterances in a Bimodal setting

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