Barbara Partee

Who is Barbara Partee?

Barbara Hall Partee is a Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is one of the founders of contemporary formal semantics. She retired from UMass in September 2004.

Born in Englewood, New Jersey, she grew up in the Baltimore area. She attended Swarthmore College, where she majored in mathematics with minors in Russian and philosophy, and did graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Noam Chomsky.

Partee began her professorial career at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1965 as an associate professor of linguistics. She taught there until 1972, when she transferred to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, soon becoming a full professor. During her time at UMass Amherst, she has taught numerous students who would become notable linguists including Gennaro Chierchia and Irene Heim.

It was through her interaction with the philosopher and logician Richard Montague at UCLA in the 1970s that the research traditions of generative linguistics and formal analytic philosophy 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.