The sign language laboratory is directed by Professor Diane Brentari, Mary K. Werkman Professor of Linguistics and Co-Director of the Center for Gesture Sign and Language at the University of Chicago.
The focus of the research in the lab is sign language grammars, particularly problems at the intersection of morphology, phonology, and prosody. Brentari has written two books, edited five volumes, and published over 100 articles or book chapters. Current projects include analyses of the emergence of sign languages, as well as studies of a new protactile language that is emerging in DeafBlind communities in the USA, which uses the modalities of proprioception and touch. The research has been supported by multiple awards from the National Science Foundation of the United States (2001- present), by a Guggenheim fellowship (2020-2021), and by the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society. Brentari is a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Recent books by Brentari
2019 — Brentari, D. Sign Language Phonology. Key Topics in Phonology Series. Cambridge University Press.
This book describes the current state of the field of sign language phonology and is a concise overview of its concepts and contributions to related fields. Working on sign languages not only provides important new insights on familiar issues about the nature of phonology itself, but also poses a new set of questions concerning the emergence of language that are grounded in sign language phonology.
2018 — Brentari, D., and J. Lee. Shaping Phonology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
This volume traces the trajectory of autosegmental phonology, the first non-linear phonological theory, and computational approaches to phonology, which have had a powerful effect on the way that the notion of “data” has been conceived of and analyzed over recent decades. Both of these areas have been profoundly affected by the work of John Goldsmith, one of the most influential phonologists of the past 50 years. This book honors his contributions to both of these important domains of phonological inquiry.
2010 — Diane Brentari (Ed.) Sign Languages: A Cambridge Language Survey. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2010.
This thematic and geographic overview examines more than forty sign languages from around the world. It begins by investigating how sign languages have survived and been transmitted for generations, and then goes on to analyze the common characteristics shared by most sign languages: for example, how the use of the visual (rather than the auditory) system affects grammatical structures. The final section describes the phenomena of language variation and change.
2001 — Diane Brentari (Ed.) Foreign vocabulary in sign languages: A cross-linguistic investigation of word formation. Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ, 2001.
This book takes a close look at the ways that five sign languages borrow elements from the surrounding dominant spoken language community where each is situated. If offers careful analyses of semantic, morphosyntactic and phonological adaptation of forms taken from a source language (in this case a spoken language) and borrowed into a target sign language.
1998 — Steven Lapointe, Diane Brentari, and P. M. Farrell (Eds.) Morphology and its relation to phonology and syntax. CSLI Publications, Stanford University, 1998.
This volume explores key issues in current morphology and the interactions of morphology with phonology and syntax. The topics included are from a wide variety of theoretical perspectives. The papers, presented at a thematic workshop on this topic at UC-Davis, are complemented with replies to each of the papers and edited transcripts of the discussion that followed.
1998 — Diane Brentari. A prosodic model of sign language phonology. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998.
This book is intended in part to provide linguists and cognitive scientists who do not know sign language with a point of entry into the study of sign language phonology. At the same time, it presents a comprehensive theory of American Sign Language phonology (the Prosodic Model), while reviewing and building on alternative theories.