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Prof. Diane Brentari | Department of Linguistics

Prof. Diane Brentari

Diane Brentari joined the department at Hebrew University in 2019 as Distinguished Visiting Professor, and is also the Mary K. Werkman Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Center for Gesture Sign and Language at the University of Chicago.

Her research addresses the extent to which the modality of a language—auditory, visual, or tactile—has an effect on language structure, on variation among languages, and on the flexibility of the human language capacity. This work focuses primarily on sign language grammars, particularly problems at the intersection of morphology, phonology, and prosody. She has written two books, edited five volumes, and published over 100 articles or book chapters, on these and other themes.

Her ongoing projects include work supported by two awards from the National Science Foundation of the United States, and a Guggenheim fellowship (2020-2021). Two-verb predicates in sign languages investigates what motivates the use of multiple verb predicates in the sign languages of the world, including the emerging sign language in Nicaragua. What you see is what you feel analyzes the mechanisms of language emergence in protactile language, a tactile sign language emerging within some DeafBlind communities. Observing the emergence of language is a comparative study of cases of emerging signed and protactile languages.