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Elena E. Benedicto
Associate Professor, Department of English
Office Phone: (765) 494-8118
Office Fax: (765) 494-3780
Email: ebenedi@purdue.edu
Specialization:
Theoretical Linguistics; General Grammar; Syntax and Syntax-Semantics Interface; Indigenous, endangered and minority languages; Mayangna; American Sign Language; African American English; and Romance Languages
Homepage: http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~ebenedi/
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.