Wh-features and exclamatives in LIS (Italian Sign Language)

This paper offers a description and outlines an analysis of exclamative sentences in LIS. The manual and non-manual markers of exclamative force have been looked for in a corpus of semi-spontaneous sentences elicited by using pictures that triggered reaction of positive or negative surprise. A follow up session including grammaticality judgements allowed to double check the main findings, namely that the main markers of partial exclamatives is furrowed eyebrows and the main markers of total exclamatives is raised eyebrows. As furrowed eyebrows are the marker of wh-interrogatives, LIS can be added to the long list of unrelated languages that can express exclamatives by employing the wh-morphology.