
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 a Professor of English and Linguistics here at Purdue, where she directs the Experimental Linguistics Lab, serves as the Associate Head in the Department of English, and teaches linguistics courses at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. In her research, she uses experimental methods to investigate the syntactic, semantic, discourse-pragmatic, and cognitive factors that underlie the grammar and usage of complex sentence structures. Her publications in this area have appeared in journals including Language and Cognition, Glossa Psycholinguistics, Linguistics, Lingua, Cognitive Linguistics, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Journal of Linguistics, and Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. Her recent book, Gradient Acceptability and Linguistic Theory (Oxford University Press, 2022), examines the complex problem of interpreting data from acceptability judgment tasks in relation to theoretical questions in syntax. In the wider linguistics community, she regularly teaches short courses at the Linguistic Society of America Linguistic Institutes, is a member of the Linguistic Society of America Ethics Committee, and serves on the editorial board of the journal Glossa Psycholinguistics. Prior to coming to 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.