Diane Brentari

Diane Brentari is Professor in the Department of Linguistics; she studies Sign Language, phonology, and morphology. Currently her work addresses cross-linguistic variation particularly in the differences and similarities among sign languages in the formation of complex classifier predicates. She is also interested in how the mental lexicon emerges in historical time, which includes the relationship between gesture, homesign systems, and well-established sign languages. She is the author of A Prosodic Model of Sign Language Phonology (Cambridge, MA, 1998) and editor of Sign Languages: A Cambridge Language Survey (Cambridge, UK, 2010) and Foreign Vocabulary in Sign Languages: A Cross-Linguistic Investigation of Word Formation (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001).