Angelika Kratzer is a
professor
Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other tertiary education, post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin ...
emerita of
linguistics
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 ...
in the Department of Linguistics at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Biography
She was born in Germany, and received her PhD from the
University of Konstanz in 1979, with a dissertation entitled ''Semantik der Rede''. She is an influential and widely cited
semanticist whose expertise includes
modals,
conditionals
Conditional (if then) may refer to:
*Causal conditional, if X then Y, where X is a cause of Y
*Conditional probability, the probability of an event A given that another event B
*Conditional proof, in logic: a proof that asserts a conditional, a ...
,
situation semantics, and a range of topics relating to the
syntax–semantics interface.
Among her most influential ideas are: a unified analysis of modality of different flavors (building on the work of
Jaakko Hintikka); a modal analysis of conditionals; and the hypothesis ("the little v hypothesis") that the agent argument of a
transitive verb
A transitive verb is a verb that entails one or more transitive objects, for example, 'enjoys' in ''Amadeus enjoys music''. This contrasts with intransitive verbs, which do not entail transitive objects, for example, 'arose' in ''Beatrice arose ...
is introduced syntactically whereas the theme argument is selected for lexically.
She co-wrote with
Irene Heim
Irene Roswitha Heim (born October 30, 1954) is a linguist and a leading specialist in semantics. 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 Pr ...
the semantics textbook ''Semantics in Generative Grammar'', and is co-editor, with Irene Heim, of the journal ''
Natural Language Semantics.''
Awards
In 2012, Kratzer was named a Fellow of the
Linguistic Society of America.
Selected publications
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See also
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Formal semantics (linguistics)
Formal semantics is the scientific study of linguistic meaning through formal tools from logic and mathematics. It is an interdisciplinary field, sometimes regarded as a subfield of both linguistics and philosophy of language. Formal semanticists r ...
*
Generative grammar
Generative grammar is a research tradition in linguistics that aims to explain the cognitive basis of language by formulating and testing explicit models of humans' subconscious grammatical knowledge. Generative linguists, or generativists (), ...
*
Modality (natural language)
*
Modal logic
Modal logic is a kind of logic used to represent statements about Modality (natural language), necessity and possibility. In philosophy and related fields
it is used as a tool for understanding concepts such as knowledge, obligation, and causality ...
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kratzer, Angelika
Linguists from the United States
Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people
Semanticists
University of Massachusetts Amherst faculty
American women linguists
American philosophers of language
Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America