Barbara Hall Partee is a Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 and Philosophy

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

 at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is one of the founders of contemporary formal semantics

Formal semantics (linguistics)

In linguistics, formal semantics seeks to understand linguistic meaning by constructing precise mathematical models of the principles that speakers use to define relations between expressions in a natural language and the world which supports meaningful discourse.The mathematical tools used are the...

. She retired from UMass in September 2004.

She grew up in the Baltimore area. She attended Swarthmore College

Swarthmore College

Swarthmore College is a private, independent, liberal arts college in the United States with an enrollment of about 1,500 students. The college is located in the borough of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, 11 miles southwest of Philadelphia....

, where she majored in mathematics with minors in Russian and philosophy, and did graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

 under Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...

.

It was through her interaction with the philosopher and logician Richard Montague

Richard Montague

Richard Merett Montague was an American mathematician and philosopher.-Career:At the University of California, Berkeley, Montague earned an B.A. in Philosophy in 1950, an M.A. in Mathematics in 1953, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy 1957, the latter under the direction of the mathematician and logician...

 at UCLA

University of California, Los Angeles

The University of California, Los Angeles is a public research university located in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, USA. It was founded in 1919 as the "Southern Branch" of the University of California and is the second oldest of the ten campuses...

 in the 1970s that the research traditions of generative linguistics

Generative grammar

In theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of syntax. A generative grammar of a language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences...

 and formal analytic philosophy

Analytic philosophy

Analytic philosophy is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century...

 first converged. She was largely responsible for popularizing this approach to the semantics of natural languages among linguists, especially at a time when much of the field was gripped by controversy surrounding Generative Semantics

Generative semantics

Generative semantics is the name of a research program within linguistics, initiated by the work of various early students of Noam Chomsky: John R. Ross, Paul Postal and later James McCawley...

.

In her later years she became increasingly interested in a new kind of intellectual synthesis

Intellectual synthesis

Intellectual Synthesis is a broad term describing scholarly endeavors meant to unify and fuse a large amount of information into a single integrated body of knowledge...

, forging connections to the tradition of lexical semantic research as it has long been practiced in Russia.

Awards

Honors she received include the presidency of the Linguistic Society of America

Linguistic Society of America

The Linguistic Society of America is a professional society for linguists. It was founded in 1924 to advance linguistics, the scientific study of human language. The LSA has over 5,000 individual members and welcomes linguists of all kinds. It works to advance the discipline and to communicate...

 (1986), honorary doctorates from Swarthmore College(1989), Charles University in Prague

Charles University in Prague

Charles University in Prague is the oldest and largest university in the Czech Republic. Founded in 1348, it was the first university in Central Europe and is also considered the earliest German university...

 (1992) and Copenhagen Business School

Copenhagen Business School

Copenhagen Business School, also known as CBS, is situated in Copenhagen, Denmark. With more than 17,000 students and 1,300 staff members, CBS is also one of the largest business schools in Europe. CBS offers a wide range of business-oriented university programmes and a research environment...

 (2005), election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

American Academy of Arts and Sciences

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...

 (1984) and the United States National Academy of Sciences

United States National Academy of Sciences

The National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine." As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and...

 (1989). In 1992, she received the Max-Planck-Forschungspreis (research award of the Max Planck Society

Max Planck Society

The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institutes publicly funded by the federal and the 16 state governments of Germany....

; together with Hans Kamp

Hans Kamp

Johan Anthony Willem Kamp is a Dutch philosopher and linguist, responsible for introducing Discourse Representation Theory in 1981. Kamp received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from UCLA in 1968...

).

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.)