Ellen Prince

Ellen Prince (born 1944 - died October 24, 2010) was an American linguist. She earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974. She served on the faculty there until her retirement in 2005, including serving as chair of the department from 1993 to 1997. She died in 2010.

Prince pioneered in the area of linguistic pragmatics. She is well known for her typology of information statuses in discourse, basing her conclusions on the study of naturally occurring data. Many of her papers have been – and remain – highly influential in the field of pragmatics. She analyzed the pragmatic functions of syntactic constructions in English and Yiddish, including varieties of cleft and left-periphery constructions, such as topicalization and left-dislocation.

She served as the President of the Linguistic Society of America in 2008. She was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2009.