Elaine J. Francis

Purdue University

Elaine J. Francis is Associate Professor in the Department of English and in the Linguistics Program at Purdue University. She majored in linguistics at William and Mary (1993), and went on to complete her MA (1995) and PhD (1999) in Linguistics at the University of Chicago. Before coming to Purdue, she was Assistant Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Hong Kong (1999-2002). Her research focuses on "mismatch" between syntax and semantics (cases in which form and meaning are in some way incongruous), with an emphasis on syntactic categories and relative clauses in English and Cantonese. Her work combines traditional analytic methods with quantitative corpus analyses and psycholinguistic experiments.