Elena Guerzoni

Elena Guerzoni serves as Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Boğaziçi University, where she advises MA and PhD students from her office in JF 305. Her academic foundation includes a Ph.D. in Linguistics from MIT (2003) and a Laurea in Philosophy from Università degli Studi di Milano (1997).

Her educational background is reflected in her dual focus on formal linguistic theory and philosophical underpinnings of language. She has taught undergraduate courses including Introduction to Linguistics (Ling 101/111) and Semantics (Ling 305), alongside graduate seminars in Advanced Semantics (Ling 58C/V), Presupposition and Implicature (Ling 613), and Directed Readings in Linguistics (Ling 572/570/579).

Guerzoni's research centers on the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface, with pioneering work on negative polarity phenomena across languages. Her investigations into interrogative embedding predicates, presupposition projection in questions, and focus-sensitive particles like even have reshaped understanding of scalarity and exhaustivity. She examines how minimizer NPIs interact with question operators and why certain particles license negative polarity only in specific syntactic configurations.

Analysis of her 13 publications (2000-2022) reveals consistent focus on negative polarity in interrogative contexts, with increasing attention to cross-linguistic variation and pragmatic strengthening mechanisms. Her work bridges formal theory with empirical data from Germanic, Romance, and Turkish, demonstrating how focus particles constrain interpretation in question-answer congruence.

As an active contributor to linguistic discourse, she has delivered 15+ invited talks at institutions including MIT, UCLA, and Hebrew University, addressing topics like intervention effects in negative concord and the semantics of whether clauses. Her editorial work includes co-editing A Few from Building E39 (MIT Working Papers in Linguistics) and preparing You Can Ask Whatever You Want (Oxford University Press).

No scientific awards are documented in the provided materials, though her publications appear in Q1 journals like Natural Language Semantics and Linguistics and Philosophy. She maintains active research through manuscripts on Turkish hani and Italian verb stress, continuing her investigation into the morphology-syntax-semantics interface.