Ever since Quine’s “On What There Is”, discussions of the types of variables in natural languages have occupied a special place in semantics. According to Quine, “to be assumed as an entity is, purely and simply, to be reckoned as the value of a variable.” After eleven years in the archives, Meredith Landman’s landmark 2006 dissertation on Variables in Natural Language has now been made publicly available on ScholarWorks. Landman’s dissertation argues for severe type restrictions for object language variables in natural languages, targeting pro-forms of various kinds, elided constituents, and traces of movement. In his 1984 UMass dissertation Gennaro Chierchia had already proposed the ‘No Functor Anaphora Constraint’, which says that ‘functors’ (e.g. determiners, connectives, prepositions) do not enter anaphoric relationships. Landman’s dissertation goes further in arguing for a constraint that affects all object language variables and also rules out properties as possible values for them. Her ‘No Higher Types Variable Constraint’ (NHTV) restricts object language variables to the semantic type e of individuals. Landman explores the consequences of the NHTV for the values of overt pro-forms like such or do so, as well as for gaps of A’-movement and for NP and VP ellipsis. Since the NHTV bars higher type variables in all of those cases, languages might have to use strategies like overt pro-forms or partial or total syntactic reconstruction of the antecedent to interpret certain types of movement gaps and elided constituents. The NHTV thus validates previous work arguing for syntactic reconstruction and against the use of higher-type variables (e.g. Romero 1998 and Fox 1999, 2000), as well as work arguing for treating ellipsis as involving deletion of syntactic structure. The topic of the type of traces has most recently been taken up again in Ethan Poole’s 2017 UMass dissertation, which contributes important new evidence confirming that the type of traces should indeed be restricted to type e. (This post was crafted in collaboration with Meredith Landman, who also provided the pictures).  

From UvA news: On January 8, the University of Amsterdam will award an honorary degree to Barbara for her contribution to the development of formal semantics in natural language. “Partee played a crucial role in the development of formal semantics of natural language. Partee’s influence in this domain of linguistics continues to be considerable. Formal semantics emerged in the 1960s and 1970s at the intersection of various disciplines. Initial ideas that were essential to the development of formal semantics were developed by logicians and philosophers, especially Richard Montague and David Lewis. Partee, a linguist trained in the tradition of transformational generative grammar (she obtained her PhD under the supervision of Noam Chomsky), was the first linguist to realise the importance of these ideas for the development of semantics within linguistic theory. Not only did she strongly promote the acceptance of formal semantics within linguistics and work to foster the cooperation of logicians, philosophers, and linguists, but also made many substantial contributions to the development of this domain. For example, Partee compiled the first series of articles, including her own, written by logicians and linguists about Montague Grammar, the leading model for formal semantics in the 1970s.” This is Barbara’s fifth honorary doctorate: she is already holding honorary degrees from Swarthmore College, Charles University in Prague, Copenhagen Business School, and the University of Chicago.