Irene Heim
Irene Heim | |
---|---|
Alma mater | UMass Amherst |
Awards | Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Semantics, generative grammar |
Institutions | MIT, UCLA, University of Texas at Austin |
Doctoral advisor | Barbara Partee |
Irene Roswitha Heim is a linguist and one of the world's leading specialists in semantics. She was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and UCLA before finally moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989, where she was Professor of Linguistics and Head of the Linguistics Section of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy and was a renowned teacher and supervisor.
Research[]
Her 1982 University of Massachusetts Amherst dissertation The semantics of definite and indefinite noun phrases[1] is considered a classic text and a major milestone in formal semantics. In the second chapter of the work she argued (developing an insight by the philosopher David Lewis) that indefinite noun phrases like a cat in the sentence If a cat is not in Athens, she is in Rhodes are not quantifiers but free variables bound by an existential operator inserted in the sentence by a semantic operation that she dubbed existential closure. In the third chapter of the work she developed a compositional dynamic theory of (in)definites. This work, along with Hans Kamp's roughly contemporaneous 'A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation' (1981), became the founding work in the influential tradition of dynamic semantics and the first compositional dynamic fragment.
She is also the co-author with Angelika Kratzer of an influential textbooks of formal semantics,[2] and is a co-editor (also with Kratzer) of the journal Natural Language Semantics.
In 2010 Irene Heim was awarded a Senior Fellowship of the Zukunftskolleg at the University of Konstanz.[3]
References[]
- ^ Heim, Irene (1988). The semantics of definite and indefinite noun phrases. New York: Garland Pub. ISBN 0-8240-5188-2.
- ^ Kratzer, Angelika; Heim, Irene (1998). Semantics in generative grammar. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-19713-3.
- ^ "Zukunftskolleg | University of Konstanz".
External links[]
- "MIT Department of Linguistics: People: Faculty: Irene Heim". Retrieved 2009-06-02. Heim's MIT faculty page
- Linguists from the United States
- Living people
- University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Humanities and Fine Arts alumni
- University of Texas at Austin faculty
- University of California, Los Angeles faculty
- MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences faculty
- Semanticists
- Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America
- Women linguists
- American linguist stubs