Elaine J. Francis

Elaine J. Francis studies English sentence structure (syntax) and how people judge whether sentences sound acceptable, using methods like acceptability judgment tasks, corpus data, and psycholinguistic experiments. Her recent work extends this to how language models (like GPT-2) process sentence structure, including how they handle relative clauses and word order patterns such as extraposition. Overall, her research bridges formal linguistic theory with experimental and computational methods for understanding grammatical knowledge.

Publication output has been uneven over the past decade, with a notable cluster of nine works in 2021 followed by sparser activity, including a small uptick in 2024-2026.

Generated by claude-sonnet-5 from public bibliographic data · Jul 20, 2026