Since the recent creation of a large-scale corpus of Italian Sign Language (LIS) a new
research branch has been established to study the sociolinguistic variation characterizing this
language in various linguistic domains. However for nominal modification the role of
language-internal variation remains uncertain. This volume represents the first attempt to
investigate sign order variability in this domain examining what shapes the syntactic
structure of LIS nominal expressions. In particular three empirical studies are presented and
discussed: the first two are corpus studies investigating the distribution and duration of
nominal modifiers while the third deals with the syntactic behavior of cardinal numerals an
unexplored area. In this enterprise three different theoretical dimensions of inquiry are
innovatively combined: linguistic typology generative linguistics and sociolinguistics. The
research setup involves both quantitative and qualitative data. This mixed approach starts from
corpus data to present the phenomenon examine linguistic facts on a large scale and draw
questions from these and then looks at elicited and judgment-based data to provide valid
insights and refine the analysis. Crucially the combination of different methods contributes
to a better understanding of the mechanisms driving nominal modification in LIS and its
internal variation.
