Barbara Partee

Barbara H. Partee is an American linguist born June 23, 1940, in Englewood, New Jersey, and distinguished university professor emerita of linguistics and philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, having earlier taught at UCLA from 1965 to 1972; she earned a BA from Swarthmore College in 1961 and a PhD from MIT in 1965 under Noam Chomsky. She is known for pioneering work in formal semantics, bridging generative linguistics, formal logic, and analytic philosophy through her advocacy for the logician Richard Montague and her role in introducing Montague grammar to American linguistics; her doctoral students include Gennaro Chierchia, Irene Heim, Laurence Horn, and Edward Zalta. She served as president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1986, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1984 and the National Academy of Sciences in 1989, shared the Max Planck Research Prize in 1992, and received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2020.