Name Barbara Abbott | ||
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Books Reference, Memories: Poems Similar Robert Lado, Johannes Aavik, Vasily Abaev | ||
Barbara Abbott (born 1943) 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 through 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.
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Research
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 uniting formal semantics, which adapts analytical techniques from logic to natural languages, and analytical pragmatics in order to order clarify 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 in terms of uniqueness. Her book Reference, focusing on noun phrases as referring expressions, shows that the issue of how speakers use language forms to refer to entities has been at the heart of debate among linguists and philosophers for centuries.
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 PragmaticsThe 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.
Upon retirement from MSU, Abbott and her husband, philosopher Larry Hauser, have been volunteering in ShareCare, a non-profit organization that provides Michigan residents with affordable assisted living services.