Elizabeth C. Traugott, Date of Birth, Place of Birth

Elizabeth C. Traugott

American linguist

Date of Birth: 09-Apr-1939

Place of Birth: Bristol, England, United Kingdom

Profession: researcher, linguist

Nationality: United Kingdom

Zodiac Sign: Aries

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.