Elizabeth Traugott

Elizabeth Closs Traugott (born April 9, 1939 in the UK) is an American linguist and Professor of Linguistics and English, Stanford University. She is best known for her work on grammaticalization, subjectification, and constructionalization. Traugott earned her BA in English Language at Oxford University in 1960 and her PhD in English Language at the University of California, Berkeley in 1964. She was a pioneer in generative historical syntax. Dissatisfaction with generative models led her to collaborate with Paul Hopper (Carnegie Mellon University) and develop a functional approach to grammaticalization, understood as the change whereby lexical items and constructions come in certain linguistic contexts to serve grammatical functions (Hopper and Traugott 1993, revised ed. 2003). More recently she has worked with Graeme Trousdale (University of Edinburgh) on constructionalization. Based in Construction Grammar, constructionalization provides a framework that incorporates several aspects of grammaticalization and lexicalization within a unified theory of how meaningnew-formnew constructions arise. Other interests include the development of pragmatic markers, especially those in utterance-final position.

Elizabeth Traugott’s initial appointment was in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley (1964-1970). After year-long teaching appointments at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and University of York, UK, she was appointed Associate Professor of Linguistics and English at Stanford University in 1970, and Professor in 1977. She served as Chair of the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University from 1980-1985 and as Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies from 1985-1991. Elizabeth Traugott was honored with honorary doctorates from Uppsala University (2006) and The University of Helsinki (2010).

...
Wikipedia