Elaine Francis
- Professor; Associate Head // English
- Professor // Linguistics // SIS
- Professor // SIS
Research Focus
Experimental Syntax
Office and Contact
Room: SC 124A
Email: ejfranci@purdue.edu
Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1999
Specialization
Linguistics
Research Areas:
Syntax, psycholinguistics, relative clauses, grammatical categories, syntactic alternations, knowledge of grammar.
Elaine J. Francis is an Associate Professor of English and Linguistics at Purdue. She completed her Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of Chicago in 1999, and was an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong from 1999 to 2002. She has been a faculty member at Purdue since 2003, where she regularly teaches undergraduate courses in introductory inguistics and language invention, and graduate courses in syntax and semantics. Dr. Francis directs the Experimental Linguistics Lab. Her research examines the syntactic, semantic, discourse-pragmatic, and cognitive factors that underlie the grammar and usage of complex sentence structures. She is a General Editor of the journal Language and Cognition, and a regular instructor at the Linguistic Society of America Linguistic Institutes. Here at Purdue, Dr. Francis has served as Director of Graduate Studies for Linguistics (2012-2016) and as the Associate Head in the Department of English (2020-2023).