Robin Tolmach Lakoff was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1942. She graduated from Hunter College High School in 1960, and received an A.B. from Radcliffe College (magna cum laude) in 1964, with a degree in Classics and Linguistics; an M.A. from Indiana University in 1965 (in Linguistics and Classics); and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1967 (Linguistics).
She was an NIMH Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT in 1968-9, was a Fellow (1971-2) at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University; and has held a Guggenheim Fellowship (1975-6).
She was an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Michigan (1969-72), Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley (1972-7), and since 1977 Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Among her publications are:
Abstract Syntax and Latin Complementation, (MIT Press, 1968);
Language and Woman’s Place (Harper & Row, 1975, republished with additional material and edited by Mary Bucholtz (Oxford, 2004));
Face Value: The Politics of Beauty (with Raquel Scherr, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984;
When Talk is not Cheap (with Mandy Aftel, Warner 1985);
Talking Power: The Politics of Language (Basic Books, 1991);
Father Knows Best: The Use and Abuse of Psychotherapy in Freud’s Case of Dora (with James Coyne, Teachers College Press, 1993);
The Language War (University of California Press, 2000);
Broadening the Horizons of Politeness (edited with Sachiko Ide, Benjamins 2005);
And about 100 papers.
Among the topics on which she has written, taught, and lectured are:
- Language and gender
- The politics of language
- Linguistic pragmatics
- Sociolinguistics
- Discourse Analysis
- Language in psychotherapy
She lives in Berkeley, California.
Office Address: Linguistics Department
1203 Dwinelle
University of California
Berkeley CA 94720-2650
e-mail: rlakoff@berkeley.edu
fax: (510) 643-5688