Dr. Elaine Francis

Biography

Elaine J. Francis is a Professor of English Linguistics at Purdue University, where she directs the Experimental Linguistics Lab and serves as Associate Head. She teaches linguistics courses at both graduate and undergraduate levels, employing experimental methods to investigate the syntactic, semantic, discourse-pragmatic, and cognitive factors that underlie grammar usage and complex sentence structures. Her notable publications have appeared in prominent journals such as Language Cognition, Glossa Psycholinguistics, Linguistics, and Cognitive Linguistics, among others. She authored a recent book titled 'Gradient Acceptability and Linguistic Theory' (Oxford University Press, 2022), examining the complexities associated with interpreting data from acceptability judgment tasks and addressing fundamental theoretical questions in syntax. Furthermore, she actively contributes to the wider linguistics community by regularly teaching short courses at the Linguistic Society of America and by serving on the editorial board of Glossa Psycholinguistics. Prior to her tenure at Purdue, Francis earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Chicago in 1999 and held the position of Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong from 1999 to 2002.

Research Interests