Wendy Sandler

Wendy Sandler is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics Emerita at the University of Haifa, and is Founding Director of the Sign Language Research Lab there.  She has developed models of sign language phonology and prosody that exploit general linguistic principles to reveal both the similarities and the differences in natural languages in two modalities, spoken and signed.  More recently, her work turned to the emergence of new sign languages and ways in which the body is recruited to manifest increasingly complex linguistic form within a community of signers.  The insight that the body can serve as evidence for the compositional nature of language gave birth to the Grammar of the Body research project, supported by an advanced grant from the European Research Council (ERC). The 'GRAMBY' project addressed five topics, which still figure in Sandler's research: (1) the emergence of new (sign) languages, (2) bodily displays of intense emotion,(3)  facial and gestural communication of chimpanzees, (4) neural activation in the perception of emotion displays, and (5) bodily components of creative expression in the project's unique sign language theatre.