Barbara H. Partee | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | (1940-06-23)June 23, 1940 (age 85) Englewood,New Jersey, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Swarthmore College (BA) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (PhD) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Linguistics |
| Institutions | University of California, Los Angeles University of Massachusetts Amherst |
| Thesis | Subject and Object in Modern English (1965) |
| Doctoral advisor | Noam Chomsky |
Barbara Hall Partee (born June 23, 1940) is an American linguist andDistinguished University ProfessorEmerita ofLinguistics andPhilosophy at theUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass).[1] She is known as a pioneer in the field offormal semantics.
Born inEnglewood, New Jersey, Partee grew up in theBaltimore area. She attendedSwarthmore College, where she majored in mathematics with minors inRussian and philosophy, graduating with aBachelor of Arts in 1961. She did her graduate work at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology underNoam Chomsky.[2] Her 1965 PhD dissertation from MIT was entitledSubject and Object in Modern English.[3]
Partee began her professorial career at theUniversity of California, Los Angeles in 1965 as an assistant professor of linguistics. She taught there until 1972, when she transferred to theUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst, soon becoming a full professor.[4] During her time at UMass Amherst, she has taught numerous students who would become notable linguists includingGennaro Chierchia andIrene Heim.[5] She retired from UMass in September 2004.[1] Her other notable students include Laurence Horn.
Through her interactions with the philosopher and logicianRichard Montague atUCLA in the 1970s she played an important role in bringing together the research traditions ofgenerative linguistics,formal logic, andanalytic philosophy, pursuing an agenda pioneered byDavid Lewis in his 1970 article "General Semantics".[6] She helped popularizeMontague grammar among linguists in the United States, especially at a time when there was a lot of uncertainty aboutthe relation between syntax and semantics.[7][8]
She is one of the founders of contemporaryformal semantics in the United States, the author of a number of influential works.[9] 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.[10]
She is the younger sister of professional baseball playerDick Hall, a major-league outfielder and pitcher and member of the Baltimore Orioles' Hall of Fame, who was also a Swarthmore graduate.[11]
Partee has received various honors, including thepresidency of theLinguistic Society of America (1986),[12] honorary doctorates fromSwarthmore College (1989),Charles University in Prague (1992),Copenhagen Business School (2005) andUniversity of Chicago (2014), and election to theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences (1984)[13] and theUnited States National Academy of Sciences (1989). In 1992, she received the Max-Planck-Forschungspreis (research award of theMax Planck Society; together withHans Kamp). She has been a foreign member of theRoyal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2002.[14] In 2006, she was inducted as aFellow of the Linguistic Society of America.[15] On January 8, 2018 she received an honorary doctorate from theUniversity of Amsterdam for her pioneering work informal semantics.[16] In July 2018 she was elected a Corresponding Fellow of theBritish Academy.[17] In 2020 she received theBenjamin Franklin Medal (Franklin Institute).[18]
She was a founding co-editor of theAnnual Review of Linguistics in 2015.[19]
