Elisabeth O. Selkirk (born 1945) is a theoretical linguist specializing in phonological theory and the syntax-phonology interface. She is currently a professor emerita in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.[1]
Selkirk received her PhD in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1972, under the supervision of Morris Halle.[2] She served as Head of the Linguistics Department at UMass for a term beginning in 1998.[3]
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.[4]