Irene Roswitha Heim (born October 30, 1954) is a

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

and a leading specialist in

semantics Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...

. She was a professor at the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public university, public research university in Austin, Texas, United States. Founded in 1883, it is the flagship institution of the University of Texas System. With 53,082 stud ...

and

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school then known as the southern branch of the C ...

before moving to the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

in 1989, where she is Professor Emerita of Linguistics. She served as Head of the Linguistics Section of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.

Biography

Heim's parents were German speakers born in

Czechoslovakia Czechoslovakia ( ; Czech language, Czech and , ''Česko-Slovensko'') was a landlocked country in Central Europe, created in 1918, when it declared its independence from Austria-Hungary. In 1938, after the Munich Agreement, the Sudetenland beca ...

, who had emigrated to Germany after World War II. She attended school in

Munich Munich is the capital and most populous city of Bavaria, Germany. As of 30 November 2024, its population was 1,604,384, making it the third-largest city in Germany after Berlin and Hamburg. Munich is the largest city in Germany that is no ...

, and studied at the University of Konstanz and the

Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich The Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (simply University of Munich, LMU or LMU Munich; ) is a public university, public research university in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. Originally established as the University of Ingolstadt in 1472 by Duke ...

, graduating from the latter in 1978 with an MA in Linguistics and Philosophy and a minor in mathematics. Following this, she studied for a PhD at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, completing her dissertation in 1982. After short-term postdoctoral positions at

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

, MIT, the

(1983-1987), and

, she took up a faculty position at MIT in 1987, receiving tenure as an associate professor in 1993 and becoming promoted to full professor in 1997.

Research

Heim's 1982 dissertation ''The semantics of definite and indefinite noun phrases'' 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 phrase A noun phrase – or NP or nominal (phrase) – is a phrase that usually has a noun or pronoun as its head, and has the same grammatical functions as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently ...

s 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 Johan Anthony Willem "Hans" Kamp (born 5 September 1940) is a Dutch philosopher and Linguistics, linguist, responsible for introducing discourse representation theory (DRT) in 1981. Biography Kamp was born in Den Burg. He received a Ph.D. in UC ...

's roughly contemporaneous 'A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation' (1981), became the founding work in the influential tradition of

dynamic semantics Dynamic semantics is a framework in logic and natural language semantics that treats the meaning of a sentence as its potential to update a context. In static semantics, knowing the meaning of a sentence amounts to knowing when it is true; in dyna ...

and the first compositional dynamic fragment. She is the co-author with Angelika Kratzer of ''Semantics in Generative Grammar'', an influential textbook of formal semantics, and was a founding co-editor (also with Kratzer) of the journal '' Natural Language Semantics''.

Awards

In 2010 Irene Heim was awarded a Senior Fellowship of the Zukunftskolleg at the University of Konstanz. In 2012 she was inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. In 2014 Heim was the recipient of a

festschrift In academia, a ''Festschrift'' (; plural, ''Festschriften'' ) is a book honoring a respected person, especially an academic, and presented during their lifetime. It generally takes the form of an edited volume, containing contributions from the h ...

, ''The Art and Craft of Semantics''. In 2024 she was awarded the Rolf Schock Prize jointly with

.Rolf Schock Prize 2024
/ref>

References

External links

* Heim's MIT faculty page {{DEFAULTSORT:Heim, Irene Linguists from the United States Living people University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Humanities and Fine Arts alumni University of Texas at Austin faculty University of California, Los Angeles faculty MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences faculty Semanticists Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America American women linguists 1954 births