Barbara H. Partee

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Barbara H. Partee.

Barbara Hall Partee (born Barbara C. Hall in Englewood , New Jersey , USA on June 23, 1940 ) is Professor Emerita for Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst . She did a great job teaching Montague grammar and formulating the Partee's Puzzle named after her .

research

From 1957 to 1961 Partee studied mathematics with Russian minor subjects and philosophy at Swarthmore College . In 1960 she came into contact with current linguistics research through a summer school at the University of Pennsylvania ; visiting professors included Zellig S. Harris , Jerry Katz, and Jerry Fodor . After her first degree, she went to a newly established graduate school at MIT and won Noam Chomsky as a doctoral supervisor.

In 1965 she completed her dissertation and went to UCLA as Assistant Professor of Linguistics and from 1969 as Associate Professor of Linguistics. There she became increasingly interested in semantics; initially it was called v. a. Generative semantics . The philosopher David Kellogg Lewis finally drew their attention to Richard Montague , who was just beginning to use methods from formal logic to describe natural languages. Partee was enthusiastic and soon began to convey Montague's difficult-to-understand work, for which she introduced the term Montague grammar , to other linguists. After Montague's untimely death, she made a decisive contribution to the fact that his approach spread and gradually diversified into the research area of formal semantics .

In 1973 she went to the University of Massachusetts Amherst with her husband, the linguist Emmon Bach .

Partee published numerous articles of his own and a. on quantifiers , type theory and tense semantics . Lately she's been working on the genitive of negation in Russian.

Partee's puzzle

Partee's Puzzle consists of the sentence I didn't turn off the stove. (= I did not turn off the stove.). The problem is as follows: The non-negated initial sentence I turned off the stove denotes a certain point in time when the stove was turned off; z. B. yesterday at 3:23 p.m. The negation does not mean that this turning off at 15: 23h did not happen. Rather, the negated sentence means that there was no shutdown in the entire relevant time interval (e.g. yesterday afternoon). Partee showed that the conventional analysis, i.e. the negation of the event, does not produce the correct reading.

Private life

Partee's first marriage was from 1966 to 1971 with Morriss Henry Partee, with whom she has three children. Since then she has been called Barbara Hall Partee. From 1973 to 1996 she was married to the linguist Emmon Bach , with whom she taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 1997 she married the Russian linguist Vladimir Borschev (Владимир Борщев) and has since lived in Moscow and Amherst every six months.

Honors

Barbara Partee became President of the Linguistic Society of America (1986), received honorary doctorates from Swarthmore College (1989) and Charles University (1992), was admitted to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1984), to the National Academy of Sciences (1989 ) and the British Academy . In 1992 she received the Max Planck Research Prize together with Hans Kamp . For 2020 she was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal of the Franklin Institute .

Publications

  • BH Partee, A. ter Meulen, RE Wall: Mathematical Methods in Linguistics , Dordrecht u. a .: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Partee, Barbara H.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Partee, Barbara Hall (full name); Hall, Barbara C. (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American linguist, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
DATE OF BIRTH June 23, 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH Englewood , New Jersey, USA