Diane Brentari is an American linguist who specializes in sign languages and American Sign Language in particular.
Diane Brentari is an American linguist who specializes in sign languages and American Sign Language in particular.
Brentari received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Chicago in 1990. [1] Her dissertation, entitled Theoretical Foundations of American Sign Language Phonology, was supervised by John Goldsmith.
She is the Mary K. Werkman Professor of Linguistics and co-director of the Center for Gesture, Sign, and Language at the University of Chicago. [2] She held a position at University of California-Davis, and then led the Sign Language program at Purdue University before coming to the University of Chicago in 2011. [3] [4] She is also a Distinguished Visiting Professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.[ citation needed ]
Brentari’s research interests address the sign language grammars of Deaf communities—how these languages emerge, and the degree of variation that exists among them. She has analyzed the formal, cognitive, and cultural dimensions that motivate the similarities and differences among these languages. Her work focuses on sign language structure as a way to better understand the flexibility of the human language capacity in constructing spoken and signed languages, as well as the effects of communication mode (or modality) on language. Brentari's scholarship focuses on the phonology, morphology, and prosody of sign languages. [5] Her current research has expanded to include analyses of a new protactile language [6]
Brentar was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the project Observing the Creation of Language (2020). [7] Brentari was inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2022. [8] , and she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024. [9]
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their phones or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety. At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but may now relate to any linguistic analysis either:
Sign languages are languages that use the visual-manual modality to convey meaning, instead of spoken words. Sign languages are expressed through manual articulation in combination with non-manual markers. Sign languages are full-fledged natural languages with their own grammar and lexicon. Sign languages are not universal and are usually not mutually intelligible, although there are also similarities among different sign languages.
Nicaraguan Sign Language is a form of sign language developed by deaf children in several schools in Nicaragua.
James David McCawley was a Scottish-American linguist.
Home sign is a gestural communication system, often invented spontaneously by a deaf child who lacks accessible linguistic input. Home sign systems often arise in families where a deaf child is raised by hearing parents and is isolated from the Deaf community. Because the deaf child does not receive signed or spoken language input, these children are referred to as linguistically isolated.
Larry M. Hyman is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in phonology and has particular interest in African languages.
Marianne Mithun is an American linguist specializing in American Indian languages and language typology. She is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she has held an academic position since 1986.
Susan Goldin-Meadow is the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Comparative Human Development, the college, and the Committee on Education at the University of Chicago. She is the principal investigator of a 10-year program project grant, funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, designed to explore the impact of environmental and biological variation on language growth. She is also a co-PI of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC), one of six Science of Learning Centers funded by the National Science Foundation to explore learning in an interdisciplinary framework with an eye toward theory and application. She is the founding editor of Language Learning and Development, the official journal of the Society for Language Development. She was President of the International Society for Gesture Studies from 2007–2012.
In sign languages, the term classifier construction refers to a morphological system that can express events and states. They use handshape classifiers to represent movement, location, and shape. Classifiers differ from signs in their morphology, namely that signs consist of a single morpheme. Signs are composed of three meaningless phonological features: handshape, location, and movement. Classifiers, on the other hand, consist of many morphemes. Specifically, the handshape, location, and movement are all meaningful on their own. The handshape represents an entity and the hand's movement iconically represents the movement of that entity. The relative location of multiple entities can be represented iconically in two-handed constructions.
Ilse Lehiste was an Estonian-born American linguist, author of many studies in phonetics.
In sign languages, location, or tab, refers to specific places that the hands occupy as they are used to form signs. In Stokoe terminology it is known as the TAB, an abbreviation of tabula. Location is one of five components, or parameters, of a sign, along with handshape, orientation, movement, and nonmanual features. A particular specification of a location, such as the chest or the temple of the head, can be considered a phoneme. Different sign languages can make use of different locations. In other words, different sign languages can have different inventories of location phonemes.
Sign languages such as American Sign Language (ASL) are characterized by phonological processes analogous to, yet dissimilar from, those of oral languages. Although there is a qualitative difference from oral languages in that sign-language phonemes are not based on sound, and are spatial in addition to being temporal, they fulfill the same role as phonemes in oral languages.
Judith Tonhauser is a Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Stuttgart.
Megan Jane Crowhurst is an Australian- and Canadian-raised linguist and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin in the United States.
Wendy Sandler is an American-Israeli linguist who is known for her research on the phonology of Sign Languages.
Harry van der Hulst is full professor of linguistics and director of undergraduate studies at the department of linguistics of the University of Connecticut. He has been editor-in-chief of the international SSCI peer-reviewed linguistics journal The Linguistic Review since 1990 and he is co-editor of the series ‘Studies in generative grammar’. He is a Life Fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, and a board member of the European linguistics organization GLOW.
Elizabeth Cook Zsiga is a linguist whose work focuses on phonology and phonetics. She is a Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University.
Laura J. Downing is an American linguist, specializing in the phonology of African languages.
Aslı Özyürek is a linguist, cognitive scientist and psychologist. She is professor at the Center for Language Sciences and the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University Nijmegen, and incoming Director of the Multimodal Language Department of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
Alfred (“Al”) D. Mtenje is a professor of Linguistics at the University of Malawi. He is known for his work on the prosody of Malawian Bantu languages, as well as for his work in support of language policies promoting the native languages of Malawi.
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