Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen (born 1943) is an American linguist and distinguished professor (emeritus) from the University of Helsinki.
Couper-Kuhlen is regarded as an important figure in the development of interactional linguistics[1] and the study of prosody in conversation,[2][3] through a number of books co-edited with Margret Selting: the 1996 book Prosody in Conversation,[4] the 2001 book Studies in Interactional Linguistics also co-edited with Selting,[5] and the textbook Interactional Linguistics.
[6] Her book Building Responsive Action written together with Barbara Fox and Sandra Thompson received the best book award from the International Society for Conversation Analysis in 2018.
[7] Couper-Kuhlen is member of the editorial board of Research on Language and Social Interaction[8] and has received a honorary doctorate from the University of Helsinki.
[9][10] Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen received a doctoral degree in 1977 on the basis of her thesis The Prepositional Passive in English, published in 1979,[11] and had been and was then a lecturer in different places in Germany.