Barbara Hall Partee

Research centers on formal semantics and its connections with syntax, pragmatics, logic, philosophy of language, and cognitive science. Helped to found the field of formal semantics by integrating the work of the logician Richard Montague into Chomskyan linguistics. Has written about quantification, anaphora, coordination, and other topics in logical semantics. Has collaborated on focus and quantification with Prague School colleagues Hajicova and Sgall and on the semantics of adjectives and prototype theory with Hans Kamp. Research on the semantics of possessives and on the Russian "genitive of negation" construction, joint with Vladimir Borschev and other Russian colleagues, aimed toward integrating Russian lexical semantics with western formal semantics. Current project is a book on the history of formal semantics - its background in philosophy, logic, and linguistics, its beginnings with the interaction of linguists and philosophers in the 1960s and 70s, and its maturation as a subfield of linguistic theory with continuing interaction among theoretical linguistics, philosophers, computational linguists, and cognitive scientists and extensions into the areas of linguistic typology, language acquisition, and psycholinguistics.