Ronnie Bring Wilbur is an American theoretical and experimental linguist and a professor of

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

in the Department of Linguistics, School of Interdisciplinary Studies, College of Liberal Arts, at

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West Lafayette West Lafayette ( ) is a city in Wabash Township, Tippecanoe County, Indiana, Wabash and Tippecanoe Township, Tippecanoe County, Indiana, Tippecanoe Townships, Tippecanoe County, Indiana, United States, approximately northwest of the state capit ...

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. 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

syllable A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...

s similar to spoken languages and that blinks can be used grammatically to mark clause boundaries. Wilbur is the director of the Sign Language Linguistics Laboratory at Purdue. 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).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.

Bibliography (selection)

*Wilbur, R. B. (1979). American Sign Language and sign systems. Univ Park Press. *Wilbur, R. B. (1987). American Sign Language: Linguistic and applied dimensions (2nd ed.). New York, NY, US: Little, Brown and Co. *Wilbur, R. B. (2011). Nonmanuals, semantic operators, domain marking, and the solution to two outstanding puzzles in ASL. Sign Language & Linguistics 14: 148–178. *Wilbur, R. B. (2011). Modality and the structure of language: Sign languages versus signed systems. In M. Marschark & P. Spencer (eds.), The handbook of deaf studies, language, and education, 332-346. Oxford: Oxford University Press. *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. *Malaia, E, Wilbur, R.B. (2019). Syllable as a unit of information transfer in linguistic communication: the Entropy Syllable Parsing model. WIREs Cognitive Science e1518.

References

External links

Personal webpage

NSF Award: Syllable Structure and Phonological Rules in American Sign Language

NSF Award: A Basic Grammar of Croatian Sign Language
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wilbur, Ronnie Living people Purdue University faculty Linguists of sign languages 20th-century American linguists American women linguists Year of birth missing (living people) Place of birth missing (living people)