Two classes of Referential Expressions (RE) can be identified in Italian Sign Language (LIS) discourse and in Sign Language (SL) discourse generally: according to Cuxac (2000) and Cuxac & Antinoro Pizzuto (2010) they are named Lexematic Unit (LU) and Highly Iconic Structures (HIS). These units have been acknowledged by the whole academic community, but they are still named and classified in different ways. The LU are somehow comparable to “words” in Verbal Language (VL) and they are often included in SL dictionaries; on the other hand, HIS form a more complex class of RE, recurring very often in signed discourse (30% to 70% of recognizable RE, see Russo, 2004; Sallandre, 2003; Antinoro Pizzuto et al., 2008). HIS are formed by strongly iconical elements, many academics consider them non-linguistic or partially-linguistic elements therefore they claim HIS can’t be included in dictionaries (e.g. see Johnston, 2008). One important consequence of this lexicographic decision is the seeming “poorness” of SL dictionaries, which contain from 2500 up to 5000 terms on average. The presence of such ER urges to investigate about the constituent units in SL lexicon and about their comparability to VL units. We will deal with this interrogative, keeping in mind the lack of appropriate forms of written representation for these languages (see Russo, 2005; Antinoro Pizzuto et al., 2008), affecting all the research about LS lexicon carried out so far. Experiences conducted with competent LIS signers has shown that SignWriting (SW), a SL representation system developed by Sutton years ago (1999), but little used in research, could be effective tool to transcribe signed face-to-face productions (video recorded data) and to compose texts conceived in written LIS (Di Renzo et al., 2006; Gianfreda et al., 2009). In this work, we make use of LIS texts coded in SW; we analyzed the typology, the stability and the variability of signed forms and the form-meaning correspondence. We examined 5 LIS narrative texts produced (at different times) by 3 signing deaf people after they watched the same video (the “Pear Story” by Chafe, 1980): 2 texts have been produced face-to-face and then transcribed and 3 texts have been composed directly in written form. Aided by the SignManager (v. 1.1), an annotation software developed ad hoc for SW text analysis (Borgia, 2010), we identified the expressive forms used for a common set of entities (animate and inanimate) and actions mentioned in the texts. Eight out of the more frequent expressions in the 5 texts (more specifically: man, child, tree, pear, basket, bicycle, to move, and to look) were chosen for more detailed analysis. Together with the LIS signers who produced the texts we investigated (starting from the SW representation in their text) the nature of the chosen expressions, later we discussed about the eventual citation forms, analyzing the similarities and the differences between the latter and the expression produced in the text. The results show recurring patterns in the identified expressive forms including both LU and HIS. Referring to the same units of meaning HIS were used more frequently than LU. Unlike the conclusions of most research, we observed strong regularities among the HIS elements, and among the composition choices. In addition HIS recurring elements were more heavily contextualized than the LU. This finding suggests the need to include these elements among the LIS constituent units. 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