Elizabeth Cowper

Who is Elizabeth Cowper?

Elizabeth Cowper is a professor of linguistics at the University of Toronto. She specializes in tense and aspect in English and Spanish. She has proposed the tense and aspect features are arranged in a hierarchical feature geometry, a proposal which has since spawned much research in tense and aspect in the world's languages. She is the author of A Concise Introduction to Syntactic Theory: The Government-Binding Approach, which has been translated into Korean. She has also made the controversial claim that plural number is more marked than dual number, in other words that plural is somehow more complex than dual. She is currently the Vice-Dean at the School of Graduate Studies, University of Toronto.