2021 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science presented to Barbara H. Partee, Ph.D., FBA

By the early 1970s, work by Noam Chomsky (Benjamin Franklin Medal, 1999) and his colleagues provided strong evidence for a formal characterization of the syntax of human languages. While most linguists believed that a similar characterization of the semantics of language was possible, there was little consensus about its form. Two conflicting views had emerged; to quote a contemporaneous paper by Partee, "One approach, generative semantics, was founded in part on the conviction that semantic and syntactic rules could not be separated in any principled way.... The other, interpretive semantics, maintains the distinction between syntactic rules as formation rules and semantic rules as interpretive rules, but does not posit any systematic relation between them." In parallel, a third approach, a novel formal account of semantics based on strict compositionality and model theory had emerged in the work of the logician Richard Montague, even though it violated commonsense notions of meaning in key instances and provided only the weakest mechanisms to handle purely syntactic phenomena. In this context, Barbara Partee first interpreted Montague's ideas to the community of linguists, finding a way to get linguists past its considerable mathematical difficulty, and then fused Montague's work with interpretive semantics to propose a specific architecture for the syntax-semantics system that has supported accounts of a remarkably wide range of semantic phenomena. In the past 50 years, Partee's approach has become the dominant account of meaning within linguistics. Partee has also trained two generations of students in this new field of formal semantics, and these students collectively provide major intellectual leadership across this field today. The fundamental ideas of formal semantics as envisioned by Partee, particularly the notion of a compositional, declarative semantics running on the output of a deep syntactic analysis, have also played an important although indirect role in the development of natural language technology. Given the deep and continuing impact of Partee's work on the scientific study of language and on cognitive science, we hereby recommend to the Committee on Science and the Arts of The Franklin Institute that the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science be awarded to Barbara Partee.