Elizabeth Closs Traugott

Elizabeth Closs Traugott is a linguist born April 9, 1939, in the United Kingdom who became an American citizen and is professor emerita of linguistics and English at Stanford University, where she chaired the linguistics department from 1980 to 1985 and served as vice provost and dean of graduate studies from 1985 to 1991. Her research addresses grammaticalization, subjectification, and constructionalization, the processes by which lexical items acquire grammatical functions and new form meaning pairings emerge within a language; she developed functional approaches to grammaticalization with Paul Hopper and later worked with Graeme Trousdale on constructionalization within construction grammar. She held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983, served as president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1987, received honorary doctorates from Uppsala University in 2006 and the University of Helsinki in 2010, and was elected a fellow of the British Academy and the Linguistic Society of America.