College of Liberal Arts

Elena Benedicto

Associate Professor, Department of English

Professor Benedicto (Ph.D. in Linguistics, Umass-Amherst 1998; Ph.D. Classics, U. of Barcelona 1992) is a Syntactician and the Director of the English Language and Linguistics Program at Purdue. Her research interests focus on the Syntax-Semantics interface in the framework of Generative Grammar. In the past, she has worked on the crosslinguistic correlations between the interpretation of determinerless noun phrases and the syntactic configurations where they appear, and on the zero-copula in African American English. She has also worked on the syntactic structure of Latin (long-distance reflexive, proleptic accusative, relative clauses) and is the co-author of De l'arquitectura, a translation of Vitruvius' treatise on architecture. Her most recent publications include “Where Did All The Arguments Go?” Natural Language and Linguistic Theory (2004) on classifiers in American Sign Language. She is currently working on an NSF-sponsored project on the grammar of Mayangna, a Nicaraguan Indigenous language. She teaches Syntax at the graduate and undergraduate levels, and courses in field methods and in indigenous and endangered languages.

She is also a member of the Linguistics Program, the Women Studies Program, the Classics Program and the Medieval Studies Program.

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