Lena Borise

Lena Borise is a research scientist (chargée de recherches) at CNRS, the French National Centre for Scientific Research.  In September 2026, she was appointed as a researcher at the IRL HumanitiesPlus, and a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. Her research lies at the intersection of syntax and phonology, with particular focus on understudied languages — so far, she has mainly worked on Indigenous languages of Russia (Khanty, Udmurt, Itelmen) and the Caucasus (Georgian, Svan, Ossetic, Tsova-Tush). She is particularly interested in how prosody interacts with clause structure, and how information structure is reflected in syntax and prosody. She has also worked on the acoustics of word stress and the syntactic and prosodic behaviour of postverbal constituents in verb-final languages. Her PhD dissertation (Harvard, 2019) explored the syntax and prosody of focus in Georgian. Before securing a CNRS position, she was part of Katalin É. Kiss’s research group at the Hungarian Research Center for Linguistics in Budapest, ran an MSCA project at the University of the Basque Country, and held an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship at the Universities of Göttingen and Frankfurt. During her time at the University of Chicago, she is exploring research questions pertaining to the syntax-prosody interface in Indigenous languages of North America (Algonquian and Salishan).