Barbara Hall Partee (born June 23, 1940 in Englewood, New Jersey) is a Distinguished
University Professor Emerita of Linguistics and Philosophy at UMass-Amherst. She is one
of the founders of contemporary formal semantics. It was through her interaction with the
philosopher and logician Richard Montague 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 so at a time when much of the field was gripped by controversy
surrounding Generative Semantics.
In recent years she has been increasingly interested in a new kind of intellectual
synthesis---forging connections to the tradition of lexical semantic research as it has
long been practiced in Russia.
