Pauline (Polly) Jacobson is a professor 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 ...

Brown University Brown University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. It is the List of colonial colleges, seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the US, founded in 1764 as the ' ...

, where she has been since 1977. She is known for her work on variable free semantics, direct compositionality, and transderivationality.

Education

She completed her

Ph.D A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

in 1977. Her

Thesis A thesis (: theses), or dissertation (abbreviated diss.), is a document submitted in support of candidature for an academic degree or professional qualification presenting the author's research and findings.International Standard ISO 7144: D ...

was entitled The Syntax of Crossing Coreference Sentences. She completed her A.B. in

Anthropology Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, society, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including archaic humans. Social anthropology studies patterns of behav ...

at the

in 1968.

Honors

She has regularly taught at the summer institutes of the

Linguistic Society of America The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a learned society for the field of linguistics. Founded in New York City in 1924, the LSA works to promote the scientific study of language. The society publishes three scholarly journals: ''Language'', ...

and at the

European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information The European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI) is an annual academic conference organized by the European Association for Logic, Language and Information. The focus of study is the "interface between linguistics, logic and ...

(ESSLLI). In 2022, Jacobson was inducted as a

Fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals in academia, medicine, research, and industry. The exact meaning of the term differs in each field. In learned society, learned or professional society, p ...

of the

Selected publications

*Jacobson, Pauline. 1999. "Towards a Variable-Free Semantics",

Linguistics and Philosophy ''Linguistics and Philosophy'' is a peer-reviewed journal which publishes work addressing meaning and structure in natural language. It is one of four top journals in formal semantics, alongside Natural Language Semantics, the Journal of Semanti ...

, 22, 117-184. *Jacobson, Pauline. 1995. "On the Quantificational Force of English Free Relatives". in E. Bach, E. Jelinek, A. Kratzer, and B. Partee (eds.), Quantification in Natural Languages, pp. 451–486. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht. . *Jacobson, Pauline. 2000. "Paycheck pronouns, Bach-Peters sentences, and variable-free semantics".

Natural Language Semantics Semantics is the study of linguistic 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 between sense and referenc ...

, 8, 77-155. *Jacobson, Pauline. "Raising as Function Composition". 1990.

, 13, 423-475. *Jacobson, Pauline and Geoffrey K. Pullum. 1982. The Nature of Syntactic Representation. Springer.Jacobson, Pauline
"The Nature of Syntactic Representation"
1982. Springer. . Retrieved on 8 August 2017.

References

External links

"Polly Jacobson's personal website"
{{DEFAULTSORT:Jacobson, Pauline American cognitive scientists Women cognitive scientists American women linguists Living people Brown University faculty University of California, Berkeley alumni Semanticists Linguists from the United States Year of birth missing (living people) Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America