Introduction

[Elizabeth Traugott]

 I have just joined DISCOURS.

 Currently I am refining the Invited Inferencing Theory of
 Semantic Change (IITSC). This combines cognitive linguistics with
 communication-based historical discourse analysis and historical
 pragmatics. The basic claim is that semantic change arises through
 strategic negotiation by speakers/writers. Speakers/writers try out
 new uses exploiting available implicatures.  If the innovative use
 succeeds, the addressee/reader will interpret the intention correctly,
 and possibly experiment in similar ways, thus replicating and
 spreading the change. The most important mechanism in semantic
 change is subjectification, the process whereby meanings of individual
 lexemes come over time to encode or externalize the speaker/writer's
 perspective on what is being said; subjectification is an overarching
 mechanism, of which metonymic and metaphorical processes are
 sub-mechanisms. The data I use are corpora of historical materials,
 mainly in the history of English, and the domains of special
 current interest are modals, discourse markers, and speech act
 verbs.

 I also teach undergraduate courses on doctor-patient communication,
 and on language and law.

 I look forward to the discussion on this list.

 Elizabeth C. Traugott
 Department of Linguistics
 Stanford University
 http://www.stanford.edu/~traugott/traugott.html