Elisabet Engdahl


Elisabet Britt Engdahl is a Swedish linguist and professor emerita of Swedish at the University of Gothenburg. She was the first linguist to investigate parasitic gaps in detail.

Biography

After having completed an MA at Uppsala University, she was awarded a studentship from the Sweden-America Foundation and pursued graduate studies in general linguistics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She received her PhD in 1980 for her dissertation entitled "The Syntax and Semantics of Questions in Swedish", supervised by Barbara Partee.
She was a Sloan post-doctoral fellow in Cognitive Science at Stanford University, a research fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute for psycholinguistics at Nijmegen and at Lund University, and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Between 1986 and 1995, she served as a reader at the Centre for Cognitive Science and the Human Communication Research Centre at the University of Edinburgh. In 1995, she took up a position at the University of Gothenburg and in 2004 she became professor of Swedish. She retired in 2014 and currently lives in Mölndal.
Engdahl has been a member of the Swedish Research Council since 2000, and she still serves as a member on the Council for Research Infrastructures. She is a member of the scientific board for CASTL at the University of Tromsø, and she is involved in the The ScanDiaSyn network works on Scandinavian dialect syntax.
In 2008, she was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, and in 2010 to the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences in Gothenburg. She received an honorary doctorate in 2012, awarded by Lund University.

Engdahl’s main research interests are in the area of syntax and semantics, in particular in the Scandinavian languages. Despite her retirement, Engdahl continues to research and publish focusing on syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and information structure.

Publications