Barbara H. Partee has played a central role in developing the non-flourishing field of formal semantics, bringing the formal semantic approach developed by logicians together with a linguistically sophisticated account of the syntax of natural languages. She has continued to be a major contributor to semantics, offering general ideas that have helped to clarify the character of the enterprise as well as imaginative and persuasive detailed analyses.
Compositionality in Formal Semantics is a collection of Partee's papers that have been influential in the field but are not all readily available, and includes a new introductory essay in which Partee reflects on how her thinking and the field of semantics have developed over the past 35 years. This collection is invaluable both for understanding the history and evolution of the field and for its contribution to ongoing research.
1. Reflections of a Formal Semanticist.
2. Opacity, Coreference, and
Pronouns.
3. Some Structural Analogies Between Tenses and Pronouns in
English.
4. Toward the Logic of Tense and Aspect in English (with Michael
Bennett).
5. Bound Variables and Other Anaphors.
6. Anaphora and Semantic
Structure (with Emmon Bach).
7. Compositionality.
8. Appendix B. Genitives -
A case study.
9. Ambiguous Pseudoclefts with Unambiguous Be.
10. Noun Phrase
Interpretation and Type-Shifting Principles.
11. The Airport Squib: Any,
Almost, and superlatives.
12. Many Quantifiers.
13. Binding Implicit
Variables in Quantified Contexts.
14. Weak NPs in HAVE Sentences.
15. Some
Puzzles of Predicate Possessives (with Vladimir Borschev). Index .
Barbara H. Partee is Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and is the author of several landmark essays in formal semantics. She has written and edited numerous books, including Mathematical Methods in Linguistics (with Alice ter Meulen and Robert Wall, 1990), Montague Grammar (edited, 1976), and Formal Semantics: The Essential Readings (edited with Paul Portner, Blackwell, 2002).
More info about Wiley Online