Robin Lakoff - Biography

Biography

Lakoff was born in 1942 in Brooklyn, NY. She earned a B.A. at Radcliffe College, a M.A. from Indiana University, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. She was married to linguist George Lakoff. She has taught at University of California, Berkeley, since 1972.

While an undergraduate at Radcliffe (in Cambridge, MA), Lakoff audited Noam Chomsky's classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and became connected to the MIT Linguistics Department. During this time, as Chomsky and students were creating Transformational Generative Grammar, Lakoff and others explored ways in which outside context entered the structure of language.

Lakoff is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post.