Papers by Elizabeth Traugott
Linguistics for Students of Literature
Language, 1981
... CiteULike is a free online bibliography manager. Register and you can start organising your r... more ... CiteULike is a free online bibliography manager. Register and you can start organising your references online. Tags. Linguistics for Students of Literature. by: Elizabeth C. Traugott. RIS, Export as RIS which can be imported into most citation managers. ...
Linguistics Vanguard, 2015
Several models of pragmatic markers in initial and final position “outside” the clause are presen... more Several models of pragmatic markers in initial and final position “outside” the clause are presented, many of them suggesting a sharp divide between periphery “outside” the core clause, and periphery “inside” the core. Characteristics of pragmatic markers often considered to be prototypical are discussed, especially syntactic and prosodic detachability. Evidence from prosody and from the historical development of some pragmatic markers, such as general extenders, suggests that “inner” and “outer” periphery are gradient, and that characteristics of pragmatic markers that are cited repeatedly are weak tendencies associated with a restricted set of pragmatic markers and cannot be used as diagnostics. Crucially, syntactic and prosodic detachability are in some cases not characteristic, nor is initial position.
Cadernos de Linguística, 2021
Cognitive linguistics seeks to account for “a speaker’s knowledge of the full range of linguistic... more Cognitive linguistics seeks to account for “a speaker’s knowledge of the full range of linguistic conventions” (LANGACKER, 1987; also GOLDBERG, 2006). It is surprising therefore that little attention has been paid in cognitive linguistics to the linguistic conventions called “discourse markers” (SCHIFFRIN, 1987) or “pragmatic markers” (FRASER, 2009, et passim). Pragmatic markers include signals of attention to social relationships (well, please), beliefs (I think, in fact), and discourse management (after all, anyway). Members of the third subtype are metatextual connectors of discourse segments (“discourse markers” in Fraser’s taxonomy). I argue that because pragmatic markers in general play a major role in negotiating meaning, they are an important part of speakers’ knowledge of language. Pragmatic markers are well-known not to have truth-conditional meaning, and not to be syntactically integrated with the host clause. However, they have conventional pragmatic meanings (HANSEN, 20...
Studies in the History of the English Language V, 2010
The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics
... and B, B “often comes into existence because a regularly occurring context supports an infere... more ... and B, B “often comes into existence because a regularly occurring context supports an inference-driven contextual enrichment of A to B … this contextual sense may become lexicalized3 to the point where it need no longer be supported by a given context” (Evans and Wilkins ...
English Language and Linguistics, Nov 1, 1997
typically center around two issues: deonticity vs. epistemicity, and degree of subjectivity. Usin... more typically center around two issues: deonticity vs. epistemicity, and degree of subjectivity. Using diachronic evidence from the quasimodal ought to, this paper argues for the need to recognize a third, crosscutting these two: narrow vs. wide scope. We argue that the epistemic use of ought to developed out of a wide-scope deontic construction, in which the modal was used with deontic meaning, but with propositional scope (contra Bybee, 1988). Rather than attributing an obligation to the subject (i.e. having narrow scope), the modal in this construction makes an assertion about the proposition as a whole, like an epistemic. However, such ought to constructions are found some four hundred years before the first epistemic examples, and thus can be shown to be distinct from epistemic uses (contra Gamon, 1994).
Style' as Chameleon: Remarks on the Implications of Transformational Grammar and Generative Semantics for the Concept of Style
The intertwining of differentiation and attraction as exemplified by the history of recipient transfer and benefactive alternations
Cognitive Linguistics, Aug 4, 2020
De Smet et al. (2018) propose that when functionally similar constructions come to overlap, analo... more De Smet et al. (2018) propose that when functionally similar constructions come to overlap, analogical attraction may occur. So may differentiation, but this process involves attraction to other subnetworks and is both “accidental” and “exceptional”. I argue that differentiation plays a considerably more significant role than De Smet et al. allow. My case study is the development of the dative and benefactive alternations. The rise of the dative alternation (e.g., “gave the Saxons land” ∼ “gave land to the Saxons”) has been shown to occur in later Middle English between 1400 and 1500 (Zehentner 2018). Building on Zehentner and Traugott (2020), the rise of the benefactive alternation (e.g., “build her a house” ∼ “build a house for her”) in Early Modern English c1650 is analyzed from a historical constructionalist perspective and compared with the rise of the dative alternation. The histories of the alternations exemplify the rise of functionally similar constructions that overlap, and show that differentiation from each other plays as large a role as attraction. Both attraction and differentiation occur at several levels of abstraction: verb-specific constructions, schemas and larger systemic changes.
Historical Pragmatics
Blackwell Publishing Ltd eBooks, Jan 11, 2008
Discourse Functions at the Left and Right Periphery, 2014
The Brown Mask [CL 3]) 2 Editions used in the corpora differ with respect to using single and dou... more The Brown Mask [CL 3]) 2 Editions used in the corpora differ with respect to using single and double quotation marks. They are cited as in the corpora.
How do scalar meanings arise
The Semantic and Pragmatic Development of Substitutive Complex Prepositions in English
Historical Pragmatics, 1995
The Semantic and Pragmatic Development of Substitutive Complex Prepositions in English Scott A. S... more The Semantic and Pragmatic Development of Substitutive Complex Prepositions in English Scott A. Schwenter and Elizabeth Closs Traugott Stanford University 1. Introduction1 The study of historical pragmatics in the United States originated largely in work in historical syntax and ...
This handbook takes stock of recent advances in the history of English, the most studied language... more This handbook takes stock of recent advances in the history of English, the most studied language in the field of diachronic linguistics. Not only does ample and invaluable data exist due to English’s status as a global language, but the availability of large electronic corpora has also allowed historical linguists to analyze more of this data than ever before, and to rethink standard assumptions about language history and the methods and approaches to its study. In 68 chapters from specialists whose fields range from statistical modeling to acoustic phonetics, this handbook presents the field in an innovative way, setting a new standard of cross-theoretical collaboration, and rethinking the evidence of language change in English over the centuries. It considers issues of the development of Englishes, including creole and pidgin varieties. It presents various approaches from language contact and typology and rethinks the categorization of language, including interfaces with informat...
Subjectification in grammaticalisation
Subjectivity and Subjectivisation
Invoking scalarity
Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 2000
The discourse contexts are analyzed in which clause-internal in fact developed pragmaticalized me... more The discourse contexts are analyzed in which clause-internal in fact developed pragmaticalized meanings and came to invoke scalarity in two domains: epistemic sentence adverb (IPAdv), and additive discourse marker (DM). In both these uses, in fact tightens word to world fit (Powell 1992): the world of epistemic belief in the case of the IPAdv, the world of evaluative, rhetorical perspective in the case of the DM. The analysis therefore provides further evidence for (i) pragmatic ambiguities across these worlds (Sweetser 1990), (ii) subjectification that shifts perspectives from interpersonal (adversative) to personal evaluation (Traugott 1989), (iii) the pragmatic relationship between scalarity, adversativity and additivity (Schwenter 1999). The different orientations of the two uses suggest they are polysemous, not contextually bound.
Literacy and language change: The special case of speech act verbs
Interchange, 1987
This paper explores the methodological and theoretical issues that need to be addressed in testin... more This paper explores the methodological and theoretical issues that need to be addressed in testing the validity of proposed correlations between the rise of a certain class of words and the development of literacy. Olson and Astington (in press) suggest a correlation between the rise of a) assertive speech act verbs such asobserve,state, andclaim, b) literacy, and c) the Enlightenment.
Constructions in Grammaticalization
The Handbook of Historical Linguistics
Gradience, Gradualness and Grammaticalization . Edited by Elizabeth Closs Traugott & Graeme Trousdale
Diachronica, 2011
Acknowledgement: Guest reviewers
Cognitive Science, 1996
in Keith Allan and Kasia Jaszczolt, eds., The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics, 549-565. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., 2011
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Papers by Elizabeth Traugott