Irene Heim

Irene Roswitha Heim is a linguist and a leading specialist in semantics.[1] She was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and UCLA before moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989, where she is Professor Emerita of Linguistics. She served as Head of the Linguistics Section of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.

Irene Heim
Alma materUMass Amherst
AwardsFellow of the Linguistic Society of America
Scientific career
FieldsSemantics, generative grammar
InstitutionsMIT, UCLA, University of Texas at Austin
Doctoral advisorBarbara Partee

Research

Her 1982 University of Massachusetts Amherst dissertation The semantics of definite and indefinite noun phrases[2] [3]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 the co-author with Angelika Kratzer of an influential textbook of formal semantics,[4] 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.[5]

In 2012 she was inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America.[6]

References
  1. "Irene Heim - Google Scholar". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2021-11-04.
  2. Heim, Irene (1988). The semantics of definite and indefinite noun phrases. New York: Garland Pub. ISBN 0-8240-5188-2.
  3. "Alumni | UMass Linguistics". Retrieved 2021-11-04.
  4. Kratzer, Angelika; Heim, Irene (1998). Semantics in generative grammar. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-19713-3.
  5. "Zukunftskolleg | University of Konstanz".
  6. "LSA Fellows By Name | Linguistic Society of America". www.linguisticsociety.org. Retrieved 2021-11-04.
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