Elisabeth O. Selkirk (born 1945) is a theoretical

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

specializing in

phonological Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

theory and the syntax-phonology interface. She is currently a professor emerita in the Department of Linguistics at the

University of Massachusetts, Amherst The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst, UMass) is a public research university in Amherst, Massachusetts and the sole public land-grant university in Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Founded in 1863 as an agricultural college, i ...

. Selkirk received her PhD in linguistics from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

in 1972, under the supervision of

Morris Halle Morris Halle (; July 23, 1923 – April 2, 2018) was a Latvian-born Jewish American linguist who was an Institute Professor, and later professor emeritus, of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The father of "modern phonolo ...

. She served as Head of the Linguistics Department at UMass for a term beginning in 1998. Selkirk's influential work has focused on organizing phonological units (i.e. constituents in the prosodic hierarchy) into prosodic structure, as well as how phonology interacts with other parts of the grammar, including morphology and syntax.

Honors and distinctions

She was inducted as a Fellow of the

Linguistic Society of America The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a learned society for the field of linguistics. Founded in New York City in 1924, the LSA works to promote the scientific study of language. The society publishes three scholarly journals: ''Language'', ...

in 2012. A volume of essays in her honor examining the phonology of many languages was published in 2011.

Selected publications

* Selkirk, E. (2011). The Syntax-Phonology Interface. In J. Goldsmith, J. Riggle, and A. Yu, eds., ''The Handbook of Phonological Theory,'' 2nd edition, 435–484. Oxford: Blackwell. * Selkirk, E. (2003). The Prosodic Structure of Function Words. In J. McCarthy, ed. ''Optimality Theory in Phonology: A Reader,'' Blackwell Publishing, 2003. * Selkirk, E. (2003). Sentence phonology. In William Frawley and William Bright, ''The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Linguistics'', 2nd edition. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. * Selkirk, E. (2000). The interaction of constraints on prosodic phrasing. In M. Horne, ed., ''Prosody: Theory and Experiments,'' 231–261. Kluwer. * Selkirk, E. (1982). The Syntax of Words. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.

References

External links

Faculty home page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Selkirk, Elisabeth Living people Linguists from the United States Morphologists Women linguists American non-fiction writers Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences alumni University of Massachusetts Amherst faculty American women non-fiction writers 1945 births American women academics 21st-century American women