Abstract
In this paper, I use diminutives in Italian Sign Language (Lingua dei Segni Italiana, LIS) as a testing ground to account for the universality of the distinction between word formation from roots and word formation from words (Arad 2003), as well as for the existence of two positions dedicated to diminutive morphemes (De Belder, Faust, and Lampitelli 2014) cross-modally. I consider the nonmanual markers (NMMs) typically encoding diminution in LIS (Fornasiero 2023) and argue that their double role as compositional and non-compositional diminutives can be captured in terms of syntactic structure. I analyze LIS data against the predictions formulated by De Belder, Faust, and Lampitelli (2014) and discuss how their proposal seems to hold for both diminutives and other evaluative NMMs, which in some instances encode a non-compositional meaning. Therefore, I suggest that the assumption of two positions for diminutive morphemes can be more generally an assumption of the existence of two positions dedicated to phonological (non-compositional) and morphological (compositional) NMMs in LIS, below and above the category head, respectively. This paper thus provides support for both Arad’s (2003) and De Belder, Faust, and Lampitelli’s (2014) proposals by extending the empirical investigation to a visual-gestural language.
