She received a BA, MA, and M. Phil in English Literature from Delhi University.
She earned a PhD in Linguistics from Cornell University in 1991, under the supervision of Gennaro Chierchia.
[2] Before taking up a position at Yale, she was on the faculty of Rutgers University, where she served as Department chair from 2005-2008 and Acting Dean of Humanities in the School of Arts and Sciences from 2008-2009.
[3][4] Dayal's research focuses on the interface of semantics and syntax, especially the areas of question forms and relative clauses, bare nominals and genericity, and quantifier words signalling free choice, such as "any."
[7] In 2002-2003, she was awarded a National Science Foundation grant, “Quantification without Quantifiers,” to study the meaning conveyed by nouns without articles in English, Korean, Hebrew, and Hindi.