Eloise Jelinek
Eloise Jelinek (February 2, 1924 in Dallas – December 21, 2007 in Tucson) was an American linguist specializing in the study of syntax. Her 1981 doctoral dissertation at the University of Arizona was titled "On Defining Categories: AUX and PREDICATE in Colloquial Egyptian Arabic". She was a member of the faculty of the University of Arizona from 1981 to 1992.
Eloise Jelinek | |
|---|---|
| Born | Mary Eloise Bull February 2, 1924 Dallas, Texas, US |
| Died | December 21, 2007 (aged 83) Tucson, Arizona, US |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University of Arizona |
| Thesis | On Defining Categories: AUX and PREDICATE in Colloquial Egyptian Arabic (1981) |
| Doctoral advisor | Adrian Akmajian |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Linguist |
| Sub-discipline | Syntax |
She became particularly known for her Pronominal Argument Hypothesis of syntax based on data from the Navajo language, which holds that in some languages the pronominal affixes on the verb should be considered the syntactic arguments of the verbs, rather than the noun phrases that occur free in the clause, which should only be considered adjuncts.
Through her work on many endangered languages she demonstrated that less-studied languages often challenged the theories of generative linguistics, and she worked to develop ways of integrating this data into the generative paradigm. Among the languages that she worked on are the Straits Salish languages Samish and Lummi, as well as Navajo, Choctaw, and Yaqui.