Elly van Gelderen is Regents’ Professor at the Department of English of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Arizona State University. She is a syntactician interested in language change. Her work shows how regular syntactic change (grammaticalization and the linguistic cycle) can be accounted for by (Minimalist) Economy Principles that help a child acquire a language and analyze it in a different way from previous generations. Her 2011 book, The Linguistic Cycle: Language Change and the Language Faculty (Oxford University Press) shows how cyclical change is relevant for theories on the faculty of language. Her Clause Structure (Cambridge University Press, 2013) examines a number of current debates in theoretical syntax. She is currently working on the history of argument structure, e.g. how unaccusatives and unergatives change in very different directions. Related interests are the evolution of language, biolinguistics, prescriptivism, authorship debates, and code switching.
Elly van Gelderen is the author of ten books and eighty or so articles/chapters in journals such as Linguistic Analysis, Studia Linguistica, Word, and Linguistic Inquiry. She is also the co-editor of two book series and has herself edited or co-edited six books.
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