ELLEN F. PRINCE

Email Address: ellen@central.cis.upenn.edu

Education:
B.A., 1964; M.A., 1967: Brooklyn College (French)
Ph.D., 1974: University of Pennsylvania (Linguistics)

Current affiliation: Professor Emerita of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania

Research Interests: the discourse functions of syntax and related phenomena; language contact, code-switching, and dialect shift; Yiddish.

VARBRUL stuff: Click here.

Membership: Linguistic Society of America, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Forces International

Some Papers (downloadable as postscript and/or .pdf files):

  • Toward a taxonomy of given-new information. In Cole, P., ed. Radical Pragmatics. NY: Academic Press. Pp. 223-56. 1981.
  • (With Susan Pintzuk) Bilingual code-switching and the open/closed class distinction. Ms, 1984. .ps .pdf
  • Grice and Universality: A Reappraisal. Ms, 1983.
  • (With Nancy Levin) Gapping and causal implicature. Papers in Linguistics 19.3.351-64, 1986.
  • On the syntactic marking of presupposed open propositions. In Farley, A., Farley, P., and McCullough, K.-E., eds. Papers from the Parasession on Pragmatics and Grammatical Theory, 22nd Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society. Pp. 208-22. 1986.
  • (With Lori J. Davis) Yiddish Verb-Topicalization and the notion 'lexical integrity'. In Farley, A., Farley, P., and McCullough, K.-E., eds. Papers from the 22nd Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society. Pp. 90-97. 1986.
  • (With Gunnel Källgren) Swedish VP-Topicalization and Yiddish Verb-Topicalization. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 12.47-58, 1989.
  • Yiddish Wh-clauses, Subject-Postposing, and Topicalization. In Powers, J. and de Jong, K., eds. ESCOL '88. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University. Pp. 403-15. 1989.
  • On the use of social conversation as evidence in a court of law. In Levi, J.N. and Walker, A.G., eds. Language in the judicial process. NY: Plenum Press. Pp. 279-89. 1990.
  • Syntax and discourse: a look at resumptive pronouns. In Hall, K. et al., eds. Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Pp. 482-97. 1990.
  • (With Gregory Ward) On the topicalization of indefinite NPs. Journal of Pragmatics15, 8, 167-78, 1991.
  • The ZPG letter: subjects, definiteness, and information-status. In Thompson, S. and Mann, W., eds. Discourse description: diverse analyses of a fund raising text. Philadelphia/Amsterdam: John Benjamins B.V. Pp. 295-325. 1992.
  • On the discourse functions of syntactic form in Yiddish: expletive es and Subject-Postposing. In Goldberg, D., Herzog, M., Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B., and Miron, D. eds. The Field of Yiddish, 5th collection. Studies in Yiddish language, folklore, and literature, Northwestern University Press/YIVO, pp. 59-86, 1993.
  • On kind-sentences, resumptive pronouns, and relative clauses. In Guy, G. Baugh, J. and Schiffrin, D., eds. Towards a social science of language--a festschrift for William Labov. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 223-35. 1995.
  • (With Marilyn Walker) A bilateral approach to givenness: a Hearer-Status algorithm and a Centering algorithm. In Gundel, J. and Fretheim, T., eds. Reference accessibility. Pp. 291-306. 1996.
  • Constructions and the Syntax-Discourse Interface. Ms. 1996.
  • On the functions of Left-Dislocation in English discourse.. In Kamio, A., ed. Directions in functional linguistics. Philadelphia/Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pp. 117-44. 1997.
  • The borrowing of meaning as a cause of internal syntactic change. In Schmid, M., Austin, J.R., and Stein, D., eds. Historical linguistics 1997. Current issues in linguistic theory. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Pp. 339-62. 1998. .ps .pdf
  • On the limits of syntax, with reference to Left-Dislocation and Topicalization. In Culicover, P. and McNally, L., eds. Syntax and semantics. Vol. 29. The limits of syntax. NY: Academic Press. Pp. 281-302. 1998.
  • Subject-Prodrop in Yiddish. In Bosch, P. and van der Sandt, R., eds. Focus: linguistic, cognitive, and computational perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Pp. 82-104. 1998.
  • How not to mark topics: 'Topicalization' in English and Yiddish. In Texas Linguistics Forum. Austin: University of Texas. Chapter 8. 1999.
  • Yiddish as a contact language. In Smith, N. and Veenstra, T., eds. Creolization and contact. CLL 23. Philadelphia/Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pp. 263-90. 2001.
  • The Yiddish impersonal pronoun men 'one' in discourse. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the LSA, Atlanta, January 2003. [.pdf file]