Elaine Francis

Elaine Francis is a Professor of English and Linguistics at Purdue University's College of Liberal Arts, where she serves as Associate Head of the Department of English and directs the Experimental Linguistics Lab. She holds additional affiliations as an Affiliate Faculty Member in the Department of Linguistics and a Courtesy Faculty Member in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences.

• Ph.D. in Linguistics, University of Chicago (1999)
• B.A. in Linguistics, College of William and Mary (1993)
• MA in Linguistics, University of Chicago (1995)
• Former Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong (1999-2002)

Professor Francis's research focuses on syntax and its interfaces with semantics, discourse information structure, and language processing in production and comprehension. She employs experimental methods to investigate syntactic, semantic, discourse-pragmatic, and cognitive factors underlying complex sentence structures. Her primary research areas include word order alternations, filler-gap dependencies, resumptive pronouns, and grammatical acceptability. She examines how various factors contribute to grammatical alternations in language use and explores how processing pressures in production and comprehension contribute to grammatical conventions.

Her recent publication record shows consistent output across multiple linguistic subfields, with a strong emphasis on experimental syntax and psycholinguistics. Her 2022 book, Gradient Acceptability and Linguistic Theory, represents a significant contribution to understanding acceptability judgment tasks in relation to syntactic theory. Her work spans theoretical syntax, experimental linguistics, second language acquisition, and cross-linguistic comparison, often bridging the gap between theoretical frameworks and empirical evidence.

• Regularly teaches short courses at Linguistic Society of America Linguistic Institutes
• Member of Linguistic Society of America Ethics Committee
• Editorial board member of Glossa Psycholinguistics
• Co-editor of Polymorphous Linguistics: Jim McCawley's Legacy (2005)
• Co-editor of Mismatch: Form-Function Incongruity and the Architecture of Grammar (2003)

Professor Francis actively supervises graduate students in linguistics, though she has indicated she will be unable to take on new graduate students for the 2025-2026 academic year. She has received research support for her experimental work, particularly for investigating syntactic phenomena through controlled experiments and corpus analysis. Her collaborative work extends across multiple institutions and disciplines, including collaborations with researchers in computational linguistics, cognitive science, and clinical linguistics.

She directs the Experimental Linguistics Lab at Purdue University, which conducts research on syntactic processing using various experimental methodologies. The lab investigates how speakers produce and comprehend complex sentence structures, with particular attention to how grammatical knowledge interacts with processing constraints. Current projects include research on relative clauses, syntactic islands, and acceptability gradient phenomena across multiple languages.