On May 31, Elizabeth Closs Traugott, Professor of Stanford University, delivered her first lecture to tteachers and students via Zoom and Tencent at 8 a.m. She is scheduled to give five lectures onConstructionalization and Grammaticalizationfrom May 31th to June 4th. The first lecture entitled “Some basic principles of construction grammar and of work on language change” was hosted by Prof. Yang Chaojun, Dean of School of Foreign Languages. Over 300 postgraduates and faculty members joined the lecture with interest and excitement.
Professor Traugott earned her B.A. in English language at Oxford University in 1960 as well as her Ph.D. in English language at the University of California, Berkeley in 1964. Her research interests include historical syntax, semantics, pragmatics, lexicalization, social historical linguistics and linguistics and literature, etc. She was a pioneer in general historical syntax, and is best known for her work on grammaticalization, subjectification, and constructionalization, etc. 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). Professor 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 (ISHL) in 1979, of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) in 1987, and of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE) in 2007-2oo8. She is currently a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In 2019 she was awarded the John J. Gumperz Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA)
Professor Traugott systematically introduced the basic content of this lecture, which mainly consists of three parts. Part I points out that this series of lectures focus on the constructional approach to language change, the complementary relationship between constructionalization (Cxzn) and grammaticalization (Gzn), and rethinking of constructionalization and of (inter)subjectification; since Constructionalization is a branch of cognitive linguistics, Professor Traugott briefly reviews the development process from cognitive linguistics, construction grammar, use-based models, historical linguistics, to mechanisms of language change in Part II; lastly, she made clear two main functional perspectives on language change: grammaticalization and constructionalization. One has to do with the phenomenon: changes that we think we see in the data, results of processes that we can only infer; while the other has to do with research practice and the framework in terms of which we interpret the data. Herlectures in the following days will be mainly about research practice and frameworks for interpretation.
All the audience present were deeply moved by Professor Traugott's passion for academics and profound knowledge as well, and they all looked forward to the other four lectures.
(Reporters: Shen Mihao, Cui Miaomiao)
