Signed Italian (italiano segnato) [1] and Signed Exact Italian (italiano segnato esatto) [2] are manually coded forms of the Italian language used in Italy. They apply the words (signs) of Italian Sign Language to oral Italian word order and grammar. The difference is the degree of adherence to the oral language: Signed Italian is frequently used with simultaneous "translation", and consists of oral language accompanied by sign and fingerspelling. Signed Exact Italian has additional signs for Italian grammatical endings; it is too slow for general communication, but is designed as an educational bridge between sign and the oral language. [3]
Signed Italian has its own grammatical rules, uses the lexicon of the Italian Sign Language, and follows the grammatical structure of spoken language. It does not include parts of speech such as articles, prepositions, verb conjugations, some pronouns, or agreement between article-noun-adjective-verb, as these create difficulties for deaf people in learning spoken and written language. In recent years, some research has been conducted in Italy and abroad on the linguistic competence achieved by deaf individuals in spoken language, revealing that this competence is often incomplete. One such study conducted on Italian deaf individuals identified 6 types of errors [4] :
The difficulty for deaf individuals to understand and produce these parts of speech stems from the fact that these parts do not have tonic stress, thus having minimal acoustic intensity. Additionally, for this same reason, the mouth movement when pronouncing them is not emphasized, making them less visible. The child must therefore make a considerable effort, both to utilize the assistance that hearing aids can provide and to lip-read, and will tend to grasp the most significant parts in a dialogue while missing all the others. Highlighters - i.e., signs that provide visual and, where possible, semantic support to morphological rules - have been identified as support for this type of difficulty. It is important to expose the young deaf child to the full complexity of spoken language, assisting them with gestural support, to ensure that their development respects that of their hearing peers. [4]
In linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection. For instance, the verb break can be conjugated to form the words break, breaks, broke, broken and breaking. While English has a relatively simple conjugation, other languages such as French and Arabic or Spanish are more complex, with each verb having dozens of conjugated forms. Some languages such as Georgian and Basque have highly complex conjugation systems with hundreds of possible conjugations for every verb.
In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech is a category of words that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are assigned to the same part of speech generally display similar syntactic behavior, sometimes similar morphological behavior in that they undergo inflection for similar properties and even similar semantic behavior. Commonly listed English parts of speech are noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, interjection, numeral, article, and determiner.
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Someone who engages in this study is called a linguist. See also the Outline of linguistics, the List of phonetics topics, the List of linguists, and the List of cognitive science topics. Articles related to linguistics include:
The preterite or preterit is a grammatical tense or verb form serving to denote events that took place or were completed in the past; in some languages, such as Spanish, French, and English, it is equivalent to the simple past tense. In general, it combines the perfective aspect with the past tense and may thus also be termed the perfective past. In grammars of particular languages the preterite is sometimes called the past historic, or the aorist. When the term "preterite" is used in relation to specific languages, it may not correspond precisely to this definition. In English it can be used to refer to the simple past verb form, which sometimes expresses perfective aspect. The case of German is similar: the Präteritum is the simple (non-compound) past tense, which does not always imply perfective aspect, and is anyway often replaced by the Perfekt even in perfective past meanings.
Signing Exact English is a system of manual communication that strives to be an exact representation of English language vocabulary and grammar. It is one of a number of such systems in use in English-speaking countries. It is related to Seeing Essential English (SEE-I), a manual sign system created in 1945, based on the morphemes of English words. SEE-II models much of its sign vocabulary from American Sign Language (ASL), but modifies the handshapes used in ASL in order to use the handshape of the first letter of the corresponding English word.
A contraction is a shortened version of the spoken and written forms of a word, syllable, or word group, created by omission of internal letters and sounds.
In Portuguese grammar, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and articles are moderately inflected: there are two genders and two numbers. The case system of the ancestor language, Latin, has been lost, but personal pronouns are still declined with three main types of forms: subject, object of verb, and object of preposition. Most nouns and many adjectives can take diminutive or augmentative derivational suffixes, and most adjectives can take a so-called "superlative" derivational suffix. Adjectives usually follow their respective nouns.
Italian grammar is the body of rules describing the properties of the Italian language. Italian words can be divided into the following lexical categories: articles, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections.
A pro-drop language is a language in which certain classes of pronouns may be omitted when they can be pragmatically or grammatically inferable. The precise conditions vary from language to language, and can be quite intricate. The phenomenon of "pronoun-dropping" is part of the larger topic of zero or null anaphora. The connection between pro-drop languages and null anaphora relates to the fact that a dropped pronoun has referential properties, and so is crucially not a null dummy pronoun.
Manually Coded English (MCE) is a type of sign system that follows direct spoken English. The different codes of MCE vary in the levels of directness in following spoken English grammar. There may also be a combination with other visual clues, such as body language. MCE is typically used in conjunction with direct spoken English.
Argobba is an Ethiopian Semitic language spoken in two parts of Ethiopia by the Argobba people. It belongs to the South Ethiopic languages subgroup.
In linguistics, agreement or concord occurs when a word changes form depending on the other words to which it relates. It is an instance of inflection, and usually involves making the value of some grammatical category "agree" between varied words or parts of the sentence.
The morphology of the Welsh language has many characteristics likely to be unfamiliar to speakers of English or continental European languages like French or German, but has much in common with the other modern Insular Celtic languages: Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Cornish, and Breton. Welsh is a moderately inflected language. Verbs inflect for person, number, tense, and mood, with affirmative, interrogative, and negative conjugations of some verbs. There is no case inflection in Modern Welsh.
Garifuna (Karif) is a minority language widely spoken in villages of Garifuna people in the western part of the northern coast of Central America.
Manually coded languages (MCLs) are a family of gestural communication methods which include gestural spelling as well as constructed languages which directly interpolate the grammar and syntax of oral languages in a gestural-visual form—that is, signed versions of oral languages. Unlike the sign languages that have evolved naturally in deaf communities, these manual codes are the conscious invention of deaf and hearing educators, and as such lack the distinct spatial structures present in native deaf sign languages. MCLs mostly follow the grammar of the oral language—or, more precisely, of the written form of the oral language that they interpolate. They have been mainly used in deaf education in an effort to "represent English on the hands" and by sign language interpreters in K-12 schools, although they have had some influence on deaf sign languages where their implementation was widespread.
Italian Sign Language or LIS is the visual language used by deaf people in Italy. Deep analysis of it began in the 1980s, along the lines of William Stokoe's research on American Sign Language in the 1960s. Until the beginning of the 21st century, most studies of Italian Sign Language dealt with its phonology and vocabulary. According to the European Union for the Deaf, the majority of the 60,000–90,000 Deaf people in Italy use LIS.
This article discusses the grammar of the Western Lombard (Insubric) language. The examples are in Milanese, written according to the Classical Milanese orthography.
In linguistic morphology, inflection is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness. The inflection of verbs is called conjugation, and one can refer to the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, participles, prepositions and postpositions, numerals, articles, etc, as declension.
The Parmigiano dialect, sometimes anglicized as the Parmesan dialect, is a variety of the Emilian language spoken in the Province of Parma, the western-central portion of the Emilia-Romagna administrative region.