Prof. Elena E. Benedicto
Ph.D. Linguistics, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
Doctora Filologia Llatina, Universitat de Barcelona

   I am one of the Syntacticians in the Linguistics Program at Purdue. I am also a member of the Women Studies Program, the Classics Program and the Medieval Studies Program.

My research interests lie mainly on the Syntax-Semantics interface, within the Generative framework. In the past, I have 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.

 I am currently working on classifiers in American Sign Language, and on a grammar of Mayangna, a Nicaraguan Indigenous language, within the Misumalpan Project coordinated by Ken Hale at MIT.

I teach Syntax at the graduate and undergraduate levels, and courses in indigenous and endangered languages.