My area of specialization is semantics, an interdisciplinary field located at the intersection of linguistics, cognitive psychology, logic, and philosophy. As a semanticist, I am interested in how natural languages construct complex meanings from small and simple pieces. This process involves intricate interactions between several cognitive components that semanticists are probing into using theoretical modeling to generate predictions, and cross-linguistic investigations to test them. To tease apart linguistic and non-linguistic components in the construction of meanings, collaborations with cognitive psychologists have become increasingly important and fruitful. We might have reached a state where we actually understand each other.

For many years now, I have been investigating how natural languages organize talk about mere possibilities: what might have been, could be, or should be. Conceptualizations of what is possible, inevitable, likely, or desirable are highly systematic across diverse disciplines and cultures, and this is why this area of research has attracted the attention of mathematicians, logicians, psychologists, legal scholars, and philosophers for more than 2,000 years.

I received my PhD from the University of Konstanz (Germany). I have been a guest professor at universities around the world and am a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). With Irene Heim of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I am co-author of Semantics in Generative Grammar and cofounder of the journal Natural Language Semantics, which we edited together for almost 30 years. In 2022, I gave the John Locke Lectures in Oxford. I am often called on to serve on advisory boards and panels for research institutes and initiatives, departments, grants, journals and conferences. In this way I can help develop directions for interdisciplinary research in semantics for the 21st century. I also developed innovative courses and teaching materials for both graduate and undergraduate classes.

Old website (no longer updated): http://people.umass.edu/kratzer/

Orcid ID: 0000-0001-5861-1152