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Elaine Francis
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Office Phone: (765) 496-1652
Office Fax: (765) 494-3780
Email: ejfranci@purdue.edu
Specialization: Linguistics; Syntax, semantics, language processing, grammatical categories, Autolexical Grammar, Cantonese, form and function in linguistic theory.
Homepage: http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~ejfranci/ejfrancis.htm
Elaine J. Francis is an assistant professor in the Department of English and in the Linguistics Program at Purdue. Before coming to Purdue, she earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Chicago (1999) and taught for three years in the Department of English at the University of Hong Kong (1999-2002). Her research investigates how syntactic, semantic, and processing factors interact to determine grammatical structure, and she is particularly interested in phenomena involving syntactic categorization and syntax-semantics mismatch. She has published several journal articles and book chapters on these topics, including "Some semantic reasons why iconicity between lexical categories and their discourse functions isn't perfect" (Language Sciences 20.4, 1998), and “A multi-dimensional approach to the category ‘verb’ in Cantonese” (with Stephen Matthews, Journal of Linguistics 41.2, 2005). She is also co-editor with Laura A. Michaelis of Mismatch: Form-function Incongruity and the Architecture of Grammar (CSLI Publications, 2003), as well as co-editor with Salikoko S. Mufwene and Rebecca S. Wheeler of Polymorphous Linguistics: Jim McCawley's Legacy (MIT Press, 2005). She regularly teaches undergraduate courses in introductory linguistics (ENGL 227) and English grammar (ENGL 328), as well as graduate courses in syntax (ENGL 512, ENGL 627S), and semantics (ENGL 511).