Barbara Abbott


Barbara Kenyon Abbott is an American linguist. She earned her PhD in linguistics in 1976 at the University of California at Berkeley under the supervision of George Lakoff. From 1976 to 2006, she was a professor in the department of linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African languages at Michigan State University, with a joint appointment in philosophy. She is now a Professor Emerita.

Personal life

Abbott grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut and currently resides in Michigan with her husband, Larry Hauser.

Career

Abbott's research in areas of semantics and pragmatics examines topics in reference and noun phrase interpretation, looking at philosophically-influenced aspects of word meaning, presupposition, and conditional sentences. She has been pivotal in both uniting formal semantics—which adapts analytical techniques from logic to natural languages—and analytical pragmatics—which clarifies the workings of definite and indefinite noun phrases in English. Her work surveying the uses of definiteness in different languages shows how it has mainly been seen in terms of familiarity or uniqueness. Her book Reference, focusing on noun phrases as referring expressions, shows that the issue of speakers' use of language forms to refer to entities has been at the heart of debate among linguists and philosophers for centuries.
Abbott was a professor at Michigan State University where she taught linguistics and philosophy from 1976 to 2006. Her main concentrations are semantics and pragmatics Her book Reference focuses on the issue of how far reference is and if it is a two-place or three-place relation. Abbott is also known for her other published works which include Natural Language Semantics, Language, Linguistics and Philosophy, Journal of Pragmatics, and Mind. She has also released a wide range of articles beginning in 1974 with an article titled Some Problems In Giving An Adequate Model-Theoretic Account of Cause to her most recent article, titled Some Remarks on Referentiality, in 2011.
In 1993, Abbott received an Outstanding Faculty & Staff Award at MSU for "contributions to equal opportunities for achievement and providing an environment that encourages excellence". In 2005, she was an invited speaker at the Third International Conference in Contrastive Semantics and Pragmatics held in at the Shanghai International Studies University in China, and was featured as a guest speaker at the International Cognitive Science Conference held at Pomona College that same year. In 2009, she was an invited speaker at the Second Conference on Concept Types and Frames in Language, Cognition, and Science at the Heinrich-Heine-University of Duesseldorf. Abbott has served on the editorial board of academic journals including The Journal of Pragmatics, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, and Intercultural Pragmatics, as well as serving as a referee for articles in Philosophy of Science and in Language.

Publications

Books