Elisabeth Selkirk

Selkirk received her PhD in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1972, under the supervision of Morris Halle. She served as Head of the Linguistics Department at UMass for a term beginning in 1998.

Selkirk's influential work has focused on organizing phonological units (i.e. constituents in the prosodic hierarchy) into prosodic structure, as well as how phonology interacts with other parts of the grammar, including morphology and syntax.

Honors and distinctions

She was inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2012. A volume of essays in her honor examining the phonology of many languages was published in 2011.