Faculty Fellow

Diane Brentari

Mary K. Werkman Professor, Department of Linguistics; Co-Director, Center for Gesture, Sign, and Language University of Chicago

Biography

Diane Brentari's broad interests address issues in sign language grammars, particularly problems at the intersection of morphology, phonology, and prosody. Her work has primarily focused on sign language phonology as a way to understand the effects of communication mode (or modality) on language, as well as the flexibility of the human language capacity in constructing spoken and signed languages. Her current research involves language variation among sign languages, and how the mental lexicon emerges in historical time, which includes the relationship between gesture, homesign systems, and well-established sign languages. Brentari is one of three Directors of the Center for Gesture, Sign and Language and is the Director of the Sign Language Linguistics Lab.

dbrentari@uchicago.edu

Topics

Featured Project

The Body’s Role in Thinking, Performing, and Referencing

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2013 – 2018

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Projects

Motion and Meaning: Sign and Body Gesture in Dance Narratives Across Cultures

This project investigated how meaning is produced by the body, particularly in the context of classical Indian dance.

This project brings together faculty from the humanities, performing arts, and social sciences to investigate the relationships between meaning and motion, particularly in the context of classical Indian dance. Training in classical Indian dance is intensive and requires mastery of dozens of...

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2018 – 2021

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