[1] Rothstein earned her bachelor's degree with Honors in 1979 from the School of Philosophy and Modern Languages at Oxford University.
She earned her PhD at MIT, where she studied Linguistics and Philosophy, completing a dissertation in 1983 on ''The Syntactic Forms of Predication''[2] which was published by the Indiana University Linguistics Club.
[3] From 1983 to 1985, Rothstein held a position as Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the College of William and Mary (US), before joining the Bar-Ilan University faculty with an Alon Fellowship in 1985.
[4] At Bar-Ilan she was Professor of Theoretical Linguistics in the Department of English Literature and Linguistics[5] and a Fellow in the Gonda (Goldschmied) Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center.
[6] From 1994 until her death, she was married to fellow linguist Fred Landman, with whom she had one daughter.