Dr Elspeth Edelstein

Biography

I received a B.A. with First Class Honours in Linguistics from McGill University in 2007, and completed a Ph.D in Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh in 2012. Having done various teaching at Edinburgh and Aberdeen during my time as a postgraduate and after, I became a Lecturer in Linguistics at Aberdeen in autumn 2013.

I do research in theoretical syntax; my doctoral dissertation looked at restrictions on the syntactic distribution of adverbs, and I won the Richard M. Hogg Prize in 2013 for a paper on this topic. I work as well on morphosyntactic variation, which speaks to the importance of using evidence from ‘Non-Standard’ linguistic varieties to enrich our understanding of syntactic structure. To this effect, I published a chapter on constructions such as The car needs washed, used in Scotland and the American Midlands, in 2014. I am especially interested in the way acceptability judgments on such variants are collected, and I have worked with colleagues in Computing Science on optimising Internet-based acceptability questionnaires (see here and here for some discussion). Recently I have also begun to explore human perceptions of language produced by AI and other issues related to the use of Large Language Models.

My book English Syntax: A Minimalist Account of Structure and Variation is available from Edinburgh University Press.