Elizabeth Cowper facts for kids

Elizabeth Cowper was born in 1952. She is a smart professor who studied language. She is now a professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Toronto. This means she is a retired professor who still holds her title because of her important work.

Elizabeth Cowper's Career

Her journey in language studies began at Brown University. She earned her PhD degree there in 1976. After that, she started working at the University of Toronto. She taught and worked in administration until she retired in June 2014. To celebrate her retirement, a special workshop was held in her honor. It was called "A Workshop on Contrast in Syntax."

What She Studied

Professor Cowper is an expert in how language works. She focuses on the connection between "syntax" and "semantics."

• Syntax is about how words are put together to form sentences. It's like the grammar rules of a language.
• Semantics is about the meaning of words and sentences.

She has studied how we use "tense" and "aspect" in English and Spanish.

• Tense tells us when something happened (like past, present, or future).
• Aspect tells us how an action happened (like if it's still happening or already finished).

She believes that these features are organized in a special way, like a "feature geometry." She also suggested that the word "plural" (meaning more than one) can be more complex than "dual" (meaning exactly two).

Her Book

Professor Cowper wrote an important book called A Concise Introduction to Syntactic Theory. It was published in 1992 and is still used today. This book has even been translated into Korean.

Working in Administration

Besides teaching, she also held many important jobs in university administration. From 1999 to 2005, she was the head of the humanities department at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Then, from 2005 to 2009, she was a vice-dean at the school of graduate studies at the University of Toronto.

Awards and Recognition

In 2014, Professor Cowper received the Vivek Goel Faculty Citizenship Award. This award recognizes people who have done a lot for their university community.

From 2016 to 2019, she was the editor of the Canadian Journal of Linguistics. This is an important job where she helped decide which research papers about language would be published.