Ellen F. Prince

Ellen F. Prince was an American linguist born February 29, 1944, in New York City, and died October 24, 2010, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, having earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974 and remained on its faculty until her 2005 retirement, chairing the department from 1993 to 1997. She specialized in linguistic pragmatics, combining information structure, psycholinguistics, and computer science to develop discourse theory, and is best known for a typology of information statuses in discourse based on naturally occurring language data, along with analyses of syntactic constructions such as clefts and left dislocation in English and Yiddish. She served as president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2008 and was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2009 and of the Linguistic Society of America in 2010.