Alum Irene Heim (PhD 1982) is the co-recipient of the 2024 Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy, for work she did here at UMass Amherst. As an article in the Daily Nous notes, this award is sometimes referred to as the “Nobel prize” of philosophy. Her co-recipient Hans Kamp also has a UMass connection: he was on the Philosophy faculty here from 1982 to 1984. They were given the award “for (mutually independent) conception and early development of dynamic semantics for natural language.” A press release from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences goes on to explain:

Natural languages are highly context-dependent – how a sentence is interpreted often depends on the situation, but also on what has been uttered before. In one type of case, a pronoun depends on an earlier phrase in a separate clause. In the mid-1970s, some constructions of this type posed a hard problem for formal semantic theory.

Around 1980, Hans Kamp and Irene Heim each separately developed very similar solutions to this problem. Their theories brought far-reaching changes in the field. Both introduced a new level of representation between the linguistic expression and its worldly interpretation and, in both, this level has a new type of linguistic meaning. Instead of the traditional idea that a clause describes a worldly condition, meaning at this level consists in the way it contributes to updating information. Based on these fundamentally new ideas, the theories provide adequate interpretations of the problematic constructions.