Elisabet Engdahl

Elisabet Engdahl (born 1949 in Stockholm) is a Swedish linguist and professor of Swedish at the University of Gothenburg. 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 on a thesis on the syntax and semantics of questions in Swedish, supervised by Barbara Partee.

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 1986–95 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 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. 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.

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.