Barbara Partee | |
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| Born | June 23, 1940 |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Swarthmore College Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Linguistics |
Barbara Hall Partee (born June 23, 1940) is a Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass). [1] She is known as a pioneer in the field of formal semantics.
Born in Englewood, New Jersey, Partee grew up in the Baltimore area. She is the younger sister of professional baseball player Dick Hall. [2] She attended Swarthmore College, where she majored in mathematics with minors in Russian and philosophy. She did her graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Noam Chomsky. [3] Her 1965 PhD dissertation from MIT was entitled Subject and Object in Modern English. [4]
Partee began her professorial career at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1965 as an assistant professor of linguistics. She taught there until 1972, when she transferred to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, soon becoming a full professor. [5] During her time at UMass Amherst, she has taught numerous students who would become notable linguists including Gennaro Chierchia and Irene Heim. [6] She retired from UMass in September 2004. [1] Her other notable students include Laurence Horn.
Through her interactions with the philosopher and logician Richard Montague at UCLA in the 1970s she played an important role in bringing together the research traditions of generative linguistics, formal logic, and analytic philosophy, pursuing an agenda pioneered by David Lewis in his 1970 article "General Semantics". [7] She helped popularize Montague grammar among linguists in the United States, especially at a time when there was a lot of uncertainty about the relation between syntax and semantics. [8] [9]
She is one of the founders of contemporary formal semantics in the United States, the author of a number of influential works. [10] In her later years she has become increasingly interested in a new kind of intellectual synthesis, forging connections to the tradition of lexical semantic research as it has long been practiced in Russia. [11]
Partee has received various honors, including the presidency of the Linguistic Society of America (1986), [12] honorary doctorates from Swarthmore College (1989), Charles University in Prague (1992), Copenhagen Business School (2005) and University of Chicago (2014), and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1984) [13] and the United States National Academy of Sciences (1989). In 1992, she received the Max-Planck-Forschungspreis (research award of the Max Planck Society ; together with Hans Kamp). She has been a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2002. [14] In 2006, she was inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. [15] On January 8, 2018 she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Amsterdam for her pioneering work in formal semantics. [16] In July 2018 she was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. [17] In 2020 she received the Benjamin Franklin Medal (Franklin Institute). [18]
She was a founding co-editor of the Annual Review of Linguistics in 2015. [19]
The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to linguistics:
Richard Merritt Montague was an American mathematician and philosopher who made contributions to mathematical logic and the philosophy of language. He is known for proposing Montague grammar to formalize the semantics of natural language. As a student of Alfred Tarski, he also contributed early developments to axiomatic set theory (ZFC). For the latter half of his life, he was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles until his early death, believed to be a homicide, at age 40.
Montague grammar is an approach to natural language semantics, named after American logician Richard Montague. The Montague grammar is based on mathematical logic, especially higher-order predicate logic and lambda calculus, and makes use of the notions of intensional logic, via Kripke models. Montague pioneered this approach in the 1960s and early 1970s.
In semantics, mathematical logic and related disciplines, the principle of compositionality is the principle that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its constituent expressions and the rules used to combine them. The principle is also called Frege's principle, because Gottlob Frege is widely credited for the first modern formulation of it. However, the principle has never been explicitly stated by Frege, and arguably it was already assumed by George Boole decades before Frege's work.
Irene Roswitha Heim is a linguist and a leading specialist in semantics. She was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and UCLA before moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989, where she is Professor Emerita of Linguistics. She served as Head of the Linguistics Section of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.
Emmon Bach was an American linguist. He was Professor Emeritus at the Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst and Professorial Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), part of the University of London. He was born in Kumamoto, Japan.
Angelika Kratzer is a professor emerita of linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
In situation theory, situation semantics attempts to provide a solid theoretical foundation for reasoning about common-sense and real world situations, typically in the context of theoretical linguistics, theoretical philosophy, or applied natural language processing,
In semantics, donkey sentences are sentences that contain a pronoun with clear meaning but whose syntactic role in the sentence poses challenges to linguists. Such sentences defy straightforward attempts to generate their formal language equivalents. The difficulty is with understanding how English speakers parse such sentences.
Gennaro Chierchia is an Italian linguist and educator. Chierchia is currently the Haas Foundation Professor of Linguistics and Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. His work and study focus on areas including semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, and language pathology.
Sandra (Sandy) Chung is an American linguist and distinguished professor emerita at the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on Austronesian languages and syntax.
Formal semantics is the study of grammatical meaning in natural languages using formal tools from logic, mathematics and theoretical computer science. It is an interdisciplinary field, sometimes regarded as a subfield of both linguistics and philosophy of language. It provides accounts of what linguistic expressions mean and how their meanings are composed from the meanings of their parts. The enterprise of formal semantics can be thought of as that of reverse-engineering the semantic components of natural languages' grammars.
Elisabet Britt Engdahl is a Swedish linguist and professor emerita of Swedish at the University of Gothenburg. She was the first linguist to investigate parasitic gaps in detail.
Barbara Kenyon Abbott is an American linguist. She earned her PhD in linguistics in 1976 at the University of California at Berkeley under the supervision of George Lakoff. From 1976 to 2006, she was a professor in the department of linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African languages at Michigan State University, with a joint appointment in philosophy. She is now a Professor Emerita.
Dr. Lisa Green is a linguist specializing in syntax and African American English (AAE). She is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In July 2020 she was awarded the title of Distinguished Professor.
Pauline (Polly) Jacobson is a professor of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Brown University, where she has been since 1977. She is known for her work on variable free semantics, direct compositionality, and transderivationality.
Craige Roberts is an American linguist, known for her work on pragmatics and formal semantics.
Alice Geraldine Baltina ter Meulen is a Dutch linguist, logician, and philosopher of language whose research topics include genericity in linguistics, intensional logic, generalized quantifiers, discourse representation theory, and the linguistic representation of time. She is a professor emerita at the University of Geneva.
Amy Rose Deal is associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. She works in the areas of syntax, semantics and morphology, on topics including agreement, indexical shift, ergativity, the person-case constraint, the mass/count distinction, and relative clauses. She has worked extensively on the grammar of the Sahaptin language Nez Perce. Deal is Editor-in-Chief of Natural Language Semantics, a major journal in the field.
Ana Arregui is a linguist and professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research in formal semantics addresses phenomena including modality, tense, aspect, pronouns and indefinites.
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