In Memoriam: Carol Gilson Rosen, 1940-2019

Carol Gilson Rosen, professor emerita of linguistics at Cornell University, died late last month in Ithaca, New York. She was 79 years old.

Professor Rosen’s research was focused on relational grammar, a framework she helped create, and centered on the Romance language family, especially Italian.

“Carol was a foundational figure in the theory of relational grammar, an approach to human language structure which looks at how the grammars of languages differ in terms of basic ‘grammatical relations’ such as subject and object,” said John Whitman, professor and department chair of linguistics at Cornell.

Professor Rosen was a native of Los Angeles. She earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Columbia University in 1962 and a master’s degree in Italian from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1965, where she later studied Romance philology. Dr. Rosen earned her Ph.D. in linguistics from Harvard University in 1981. She was the co-author of the textbook Romance Languages: A Historical Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Dr. Rosen joined the Cornell faculty in 1978 as an instructor and became an assistant professor in 1981. She was tenured as an associate professor of modern languages in 1987 and was named full professor in 1994. She retired in 2010