Elizabeth C. Traugott

Elizabeth Closs Traugott is an American linguist and Professor Emerita of Linguistics and English, Stanford University. She is best known for her work on grammaticalization, subjectification, and constructionalization.

Education and career

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.
Elizabeth Traugott's initial appointment was in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. 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 from 1977 until her retirement in 2003. 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 and The University of Helsinki.
She was a pioneer in generative historical syntax. Dissatisfaction with generative models led her to collaborate with Paul Hopper 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. More recently she has worked with Graeme Trousdale on constructionalization. Based in Construction Grammar, constructionalization provides a framework that incorporates several aspects of grammaticalization and lexicalization within a unified theory of how new meaning-new form constructions arise. Other interests include the development of pragmatic markers, especially those in utterance-final position.

Awards and distinctions

Traugott held a Guggenheim fellowship in 1983 and a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1983-84. She was President of the International Society for Historical Linguistics in 1979, of the Linguistic Society of America in 1987, and of the International Society for the Linguistics of English in 2007-2008. She is currently a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2019 she was awarded the John J. Gumperz Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Pragmatics Association.
Her papers are archived by the School of Advanced Study, University of London.

Publications

Selected Books
1972 A History of English Syntax. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
1980 Linguistics for Students of Literature. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc.
1986 On Conditionals, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
1991 Approaches to Grammaticalization, 2 Vols., Amsterdam: Benjamins.
1993 Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2002 Regularity in Semantic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2003 Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, revised 2nd edition.
2005 Lexicalization and Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2010 Gradience, Gradualness and Grammaticalization. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
2012 The Oxford Handbook of the History of English. New York: Oxford University Press.
2013 Constructionalization and Constructional Changes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.