UMass Amherst Professor Barbara Partee Inducted into British Academy and Awarded Medal for Contributions to Linguistics Research

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AMHERST, Mass. – Barbara Hall Partee, distinguished professor emerita of linguistics and philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, was inducted into the British Academy as a corresponding member on Sept. 24 during ceremonies in London.

The Amherst resident is one of only 20 corresponding fellows elected from universities outside of the United Kingdom.

According to the announcement of the selection, “These new fellows of the British Academy join a community of over 1,400 of the leading minds that make up the U.K.’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences. Current fellows include the classicist Dame Mary Beard, the historian Sir Simon Schama and philosopher Baroness Onora O’Neill, while previous fellows include
Sir Winston Churchill, C.S. Lewis, Seamus Heaney and Beatrice Webb.”

Earlier in the day, the academy recognized Partee’s career achievements with the Neil and Saras Smith Medal for her leading contributions to the study of semantics, syntax and pragmatics. The annual award was established in 2013 by Neil Smith, a fellow of the British Academy and emeritus professor of linguistics at University College London.

“It’s an exciting honor and a lovely surprise to receive this medal from the British Academy,” adds Partee. “I’m most grateful to Neil and Saras Smith for generously establishing this award; linguistics has very few awards, and it’s wonderful to have such nice recognition of the value of work in formal semantics, a field that didn’t exist when I was starting out, but is now flourishing in the U.S., the U.K. and around the world.”

The medal was first presented in 2014 to Noam Chomsky, the first linguist to receive an honorary degree from UMass Amherst, says Partee. “I was in his first class of Ph.D. students at MIT, which makes it a delightful honor for me.”

In 1972, Partee became one of the founding faculty members of the newly formed UMass Amherst department of linguistics, at the time one of the first departments in the country to be dedicated to the study of formal linguistic theory. She served as head of the department from 1987-93. She retired in 2004, but continues to teach part-time.

She has six honorary doctorates, was president of the Linguistic Society of America, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

During her visit to London, Partee also gave an invited lecture at University College London.