Ronnie Wilbur

Last updated

Ronnie Bring Wilbur is an American theoretical and experimental linguist and a professor of linguistics in the Department of Linguistics, School of Interdisciplinary Studies, College of Liberal Arts, at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. She also has a joint appointment in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences in the College of Health and Human sciences. Her main focus is sign language linguistics. Some of Wilbur's major contributions to the subfield include the discovery that sign languages have syllables similar to spoken languages and that blinks can be used grammatically to mark clause boundaries. [1] Wilbur is the director of the Sign Language Linguistics Laboratory at Purdue. [2] Research on the cross-linguistic typology of sign languages is a major focus, including Croatian Sign Language (HZJ), Austrian Sign Language (ÖGS), and Turkish Sign Language (TİD). [3]

Contents

Bibliography (selection)

Related Research Articles

A phoneme is any set of similar speech sounds that is perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages contains phonemes, and all spoken languages include both consonant and vowel phonemes. Phonemes are primarily studied under the branch of linguistics known as phonology.

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:

In phonetics, rhotic consonants, or "R-like" sounds, are liquid consonants that are traditionally represented orthographically by symbols derived from the Greek letter rho, including ⟨R⟩, ⟨r⟩ in the Latin script and ⟨Р⟩, ⟨p⟩ in the Cyrillic script. They are transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet by upper- or lower-case variants of Roman ⟨R⟩, ⟨r⟩: ⟨r⟩, ⟨ɾ⟩, ⟨ɹ⟩, ⟨ɻ⟩, ⟨ʀ⟩, ⟨ʁ⟩, ⟨ɽ⟩, and ⟨ɺ⟩. Transcriptions for vocalic or semivocalic realisations of underlying rhotics include the ⟨ə̯⟩ and ⟨ɐ̯⟩.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language, involving analysis of language form, language meaning, and language in context.

Metathesis is the transposition of sounds or syllables in a word or of words in a sentence. Most commonly, it refers to the interchange of two or more contiguous segments or syllables, known as adjacent metathesis or local metathesis:

An iamb or iambus is a metrical foot used in various types of poetry. Originally the term referred to one of the feet of the quantitative meter of classical Greek prosody: a short syllable followed by a long syllable. This terminology was adopted in the description of accentual-syllabic verse in English, where it refers to a foot comprising an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Thus a Latin word like íbī, because of its short-long rhythm, is considered by Latin scholars to be an iamb, but because it has a stress on the first syllable, in modern linguistics it is considered to be a trochee.

Phonotactics is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes. Phonotactics defines permissible syllable structure, consonant clusters and vowel sequences by means of phonotactic constraints.

Isochrony is a linguistic analysis or hypothesis assuming that any spoken language's utterances are divisible into equal rhythmic portions of some kind. Under this assumption, languages are proposed to broadly fall into one of two categories based on rhythm or timing: syllable-timed or stress-timed languages. However, empirical studies have been unable to directly or fully support the hypothesis, so the concept remains controversial in linguistics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jerzy Rubach</span> Polish linguist (born 1948)

Jerzy Jan Rubach is a Polish linguist who specializes in phonology. He is a professor of linguistics at the University of Iowa and the University of Warsaw (Poland).

Junko Itō is a Japanese-born American linguist. She is emerita research professor of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Jeroen van de Weijer is a Dutch linguist who teaches phonology, morphology, phonetics, psycholinguistics, historical linguistics and other courses at Shenzhen University, where he is Distinguished Professor of English linguistics at the School of Foreign Languages. Before, he was Full Professor of English Linguistics at Shanghai International Studies University, in the School of English Studies.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marc van Oostendorp</span> Dutch linguist and Esperantist, professor at Radboud University

Marc van Oostendorp is a Dutch linguist and Esperantist. From 2004 he has served as a weekly commentator on linguistics for Radio Noord-Holland. Since 2007, he has researched phonological microvariation, dialectology and interlinguistics. He is currently attached to the Radboud University in Nijmegen.

Donca Steriade is a Romanian-American professor of Linguistics at MIT, specializing in phonological theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wendy Sandler</span> American-Israeli linguist

Wendy Sandler is an American-Israeli linguist who is known for her research on the phonology of Sign Languages.

Ellen M. Kaisse is an American linguist. She is professor emerita of linguistics at the University of Washington, best known for her research on the interface between phonology, syntax, and morphology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harry van der Hulst</span> Dutch linguist

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.

Monik Charette is a French-Canadian linguist and phonologist who taught at SOAS the University of London, in the United Kingdom. She specializes in phonology, morphophonology, stress systems, vowel harmony, syllabic structure and word-structure, focusing on Altaic languages, Turkish, and French.

Colin J. Ewen is Emeritus Professor of English Linguistics and Phonology at Leiden University. He is known for his works on phonology and is an editor of the journal Phonology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Wiese (linguist)</span> German linguist

Richard Wiese is a German linguist, with academic degrees from the universities of Bielefeld and Düsseldorf. Since 1996, he is a professor of German Linguistics at Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany, now retired. He has also worked at the universities of Bielefeld, Kassel, TU Berlin, and Düsseldorf.

References

  1. Syllables: Wilbur, R. B. (1982). A multi-tiered theory of syllable structure for American Sign Language. Paper presented at the Annual meeting, Linguistic Society of America, San Diego, CA.; Wilbur, R. B. (2011). Sign syllables. In van Oostendorp, Marc, Colin J. Ewen, Elizabeth Hume and Keren Rice (eds). The Blackwell Companion to Phonology, 1309–1334. Blackwell Publishing. Blackwell Reference Online. Blinks: Wilbur, R. B. 1994. Eyeblinks and ASL phrase structure. Sign Language Studies 84: 221 240.
  2. "Ronnie Wilbur - Speech, Language, & Hearing Sciences - Purdue University".
  3. Wilbur, R. B. (ed.) 2006. Investigating Understudied Sign Languages: Croatian SL and Austrian SL, with comparison to American SL. Sign Language & Linguistics 9, special issue.