Elisabet Engdahl is a Swedish linguist and professor of Swedish at the University of Gothenburg.
Education
After having completed an Master of Arts 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 Doctor of Philosophy in 1980 on a thesis on the syntax and semantics of questions in Swedish, supervised by Barbara Partee.
Career
She was Sloan post-doctoral fellow in Cognitive Science at Stanford University, research fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute for psycho-linguistics at Nijmegen and at Lund University and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Between 1986-1995 she was attached to the Centre for Cognitive Science (nowadays part of the School of Informatics) and the Human Communication Research Centre at the University of Edinburgh. Engdahl’s main research interests are in the area of syntax and semantics, in particular in the Scandinavian languages.
She is involved in the ScanDiaSyn network which works on Scandinavian dialect syntax.
She was one of the first researchers to investigate parasitic gaps.
Membership
Engdahl has been a member of the Swedish Research Council since 2000 and is currently member of the Council for Research Infrastructures. She is a member of the scientific board for CASTL (Center for Advanced Study in Theoretical Linguistics) at the University of Tromsø 2007–2012.