Legendre studied English literature at the University of Tours, earning a licentiate in 1974.
Her dissertation, Topics in French Syntax, was supervised by David M. Perlmutter and Sandra Chung.
[6] She became an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Colorado Boulder and earned tenure there in 1994.
[6] Legendre is the author of the book Topics in French Syntax (Routledge, 1994)[2] and the coauthor with Paul Smolensky of the two-volume The Harmonic Mind (MIT Press, 2006).
[3] She is also a co-editor of edited volumes including Optimality-Theoretic Syntax (MIT Press, 2001)[4] and Optimality-Theoretic Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics: From Uni- To Bidirectional Optimization (Oxford University Press, 2016).