Barbara H. Partee
Barbara Partee | |
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Born | |
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]
Biography
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]
Awards and distinctions
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]
See also
Bibliography
- Partee, Barbara (1978), Fundamentals of Mathematics for Linguistics, Dordrecht: Springer, ISBN 978-9-02770-809-0.
- Stockwell, Robert P & Schachter, Paul & Partee, Barbara Hall. 1973. The major syntactic structures of English. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. [Original unabridged 1968 version: Integration of transformational theories on English syntax. Bedford, MA: ESD.]
References
- ^ a b Partee, Barbara H. "Barbara Partee". people.umass.edu. Retrieved 2022-11-01.
- ^ Boston Herald, June 12, 1965
- ^ "International Linguistics Community Online". Archived from the original on 2019-12-06. Retrieved 2011-11-05.
- ^ "Alumni and their Dissertations – MIT Linguistics". linguistics.mit.edu. Retrieved 2017-11-12.
- ^ "Barbara Partee, University of Massachusetts, Amherst". linguistlist.org. Archived from the original on 2019-12-06. Retrieved 2017-11-12.
- ^ "How Linguist Barbara Partee Pioneered a Field by Studying What She Loved". alum.mit.edu. Retrieved 2022-03-07.
- ^ Holton, Richard (2003). "David Lewis's Philosophy of Language". Mind and Language. 18 (3): 286–295. doi:10.1111/1468-0017.00228.
- ^ Murphy, Koskela (2010). Key Terms in Semantics. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 206. ISBN 9781847062765.
- ^ Schiffer, Stephen (2015). "Meaning and Formal Semantics in Generative Grammar". Erkenntnis. 80 (1 Supplement): 61–87. doi:10.1007/s10670-014-9660-7. S2CID 121970600.
- ^ "Barbara H Partee - Google Scholar Citations". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2017-11-12.
- ^ "The Fulbright Program in Russia | Barbara H. Partee". www.fulbright.ru. Retrieved 2017-11-12.
- ^ "Presidents | Linguistic Society of America". www.linguisticsociety.org. Retrieved 2017-11-12.
- ^ "Partee, Barbara". AAAS - The World's Largest General Scientific Society. 2016-08-01. Archived from the original on 2017-11-12. Retrieved 2017-11-12.
- ^ "B.H. Partee". Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Archived from the original on 13 February 2016. Retrieved 13 February 2016.
- ^ "LSA Fellows By Name". Linguistic Society of America. Retrieved 8 August 2017.
- ^ "OnzeTaal Wat is de formule voor het woord struik?". Onze Taal. Retrieved 8 January 2018.
- ^ "Record number of academics elected to British Academy | British Academy". British Academy. Retrieved 2018-07-22.
- ^ "The Franklin Institute Awards". The Franklin Institute. 2014-02-03. Retrieved 2022-11-01.
- ^ Liberman, Mark; Partee, Barbara (2015). "Introduction". Annual Review of Linguistics. 1: v–vi. doi:10.1146/annurev-li-1-122414-100001.
External links
- Barbara Partee's website
- Barbara H. Partee: Reflections of a formal semanticist as of Feb 2005. (an extended version of the introductory essay in Barbara H. Partee: Compositionality in Formal Semantics: Selected Papers of Barbara Partee. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 2004.)
- Barbara Partee recalls her days at the MITRE Corporation, 1963-1965
- 1940 births
- Living people
- People from Englewood, New Jersey
- Swarthmore College alumni
- MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences alumni
- Linguists from the United States
- Women linguists
- Semanticists
- University of California, Los Angeles faculty
- University of Massachusetts Amherst faculty
- Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
- Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
- Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society
- Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America
- Corresponding Fellows of the British Academy
- Recipients of the Neil and Saras Smith Medal for Linguistics
- Linguistic Society of America presidents
- Annual Reviews (publisher) editors
- The Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science laureates