Ted Supalla

Dr. Ted Supalla is a deaf linguist whose research centers on sign language in its developmental and global context, including studies of the grammatical structure and evolution of American Sign Language and other sign languages.

Previously at the University of Illinois-Champaign and the University of Rochester in New York, Supalla is a professor in the Department of Neurology at Georgetown University.

Ted Supalla was born deaf, into a deaf family, including his younger brother Sam. Ted's father would often go to the Deaf Club, bringing the whole family along to attend.

He is married to Dr. Elissa L. Newport, also a professor in the Department of Neurology at Georgetown University.

Supalla co-authored with Elissa Newport the first work on the use of movement changes to derive nouns from verbs in American Sign Language. He also produced the seminal work on the structure of classifier constructions and verbs of motion and location. He has published a book and several journal articles on the history of American Sign Language and the processes of linguistic change that introduce new grammatical forms into a sign language over its history. In all of these works, his overarching claim is that the structure of sign languages is quite parallel to that of spoken languages, in complexity and in the processes that introduce grammatical complexities into the language. His recent work focuses on the structure of quite different sign language typologies, comparing American Sign Language and its family of French-derived sign languages with the quite different family of sign languages in Japan and other parts of Asia.

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