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

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

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

Purdue University Purdue University is a public land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded in 1869 after Lafayette businessman John Purdue donated land and money ...

West Lafayette West Lafayette () is a city in Wabash Township, Tippecanoe County, Indiana, United States, about northwest of the state capital of Indianapolis and southeast of Chicago. West Lafayette is directly across the Wabash River from its sister c ...

Indiana Indiana () is a U.S. state in the Midwestern United States. It is the 38th-largest by area and the 17th-most populous of the 50 States. Its capital and largest city is Indianapolis. Indiana was admitted to the United States as the 19th s ...

. 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 unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "bu ...

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 Linguists from the United States Purdue University faculty Linguists of sign languages 20th-century linguists Women linguists Year of birth missing (living people) Place of birth missing (living people)