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The LIS Corpus Project: A Discussion of Sociolinguistic Variation in the Lexicon

FOLLOWING A WELL-ESTABLISHED tradition going back to the 1980s (cf. Volterra 1987/2004), we use the name Lingua dei Segni Italiana (Italian Sign Language [LIS]) for the language used by Italian deaf people (and by Swiss deaf people living in the Ticino canton). In addition, LIS is becoming more and more visible, and its status as a minority language in the general Italian community is growing stronger due to various reasons. On the one hand, the research has shown that LIS, as other sign languages, exhibits all of the fundamental linguistic properties of natural languages: It can convey the same range of meanings and has a natural history, as spoken languages do. In particular, its phonology, morphology, and syntax are as complex as those of spoken languages like Italian.1 These facts about LIS are becoming established outside the community of sign language users partly due to the fact that a LIS program is offered by one university (Ca' Foscari Venice), and courses in LIS are now taught in various universities around the country. Another fact that is strengthening the status of LIS is that national television channels are now required to broadcast some news programs with LIS interpreting, making LIS visible to the larger population. Still, LIS has not yet received formal recognition by the Italian authorities, although various bills are sitting in the Italian parliament for the recognition of LIS as a minority language. This lack of formal recognition has serious consequences (e.g., in the educational system). Deaf children are now generally mainstreamed, and there is no guarantee that LIS will be used in their education. Interpreting, not to mention bilingual/bimodal education, is still the exception rather than the rule. In general, LIS is rarely used in institutional settings and is mostly used in private exchanges and informal gatherings. Given this scenario, it is not surprising that existing research on LIS reflects an impressive degree of variation. Still, a comprehensive sociolinguistic study of LIS varieties used around the country has not been systematically carried out until recently. This article describes an extensive collection of data from ten cities with 165 signers, which at the time of writing had just been concluded and reports on some of the data emerging from the LIS corpus resulting from this collection. Initial plans to build a systematic corpus for LIS were made in 2006 thanks to the input of Ceil Lucas, whose contribution was essential for the collection of the ASL corpus (cf. Lucas, Bayley, and Valli 2001). Lucas approached some of the Italian researchers who were working on LIS and discussed with them the guidelines of a research project that would reproduce (with some important differences) the methodology of data collection used for ASL. Adam Schembri, who worked on a corpus for AUSLAN and BSL, and Robert Bayley were also consulted in this preliminary phase. Three universities (Venice, Milan-Bicocca, and Rome- La Sapienza) joined their efforts and applied to the Italian Ministry of University for a grant. The grant proposal (PRIN 2007 project, "Dimensions of Variation in Italian Sign Language") was approved (with some delay) in September 2008, so the actual data collection began in February 2009. Data collection in most cities took place in 2009, although data from two cities (Catanzaro and Milan) were collected in 2010. This article is organized as follows: In the following section we describe the general methodological issues we faced when planning the data collection and which motivated our choice of cities and participants. Then we describe the specific elicitation methods we adopted. After that, we describe in detail both the lexical variations we encountered and the results of the statistical analyses carried out on this part of the corpus. Finally, we present our conclusions. Building the LIS Corpus: Choosing Cities and Participants When we initially planned to build a LIS corpus on which we (and other researchers) could run statistical analyses to explore the sociolinguistics of LIS, we faced two problems. …