Semantics” can mean quite different things in different contexts; fields concerned with semantics are as diverse as psychology, law, computer science, lexicography, logic, philosophy, and linguistics. “Pragmatics” is an equally wide-ranging term, with applications in politics and ethics as well as in linguistics and philosophy. Formal semantics and pragmatics as it has developed over the last 50 years has been shaped by fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration among linguists, philosophers, and logicians.

In this talk I’ll reflect on developments in semantics in linguistics and philosophy starting in the 1960’s and the growth of formal semantics and formal pragmatics. I’ll touch in passing on innovations and “big ideas” that have shaped the development of formal semantics and its relation to syntax and to pragmatics over the decades. And I’ll describe some of the ways that advances and debates in formal semantics and pragmatics have been and are connected with foundational issues in linguistic theory, philosophy, and cognitive science.

Barbara H Partee is a distinguished University Professor Emerita of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research centers on formal semantics, of which she is one of the founders; she is writing a book on the history of formal semantics. In addition to her more than 30 years at UMass Amherst, she introduced formal semantics to Moscow in 18 years of part-time teaching at three universities there from 1996 to 2014, and has worked with her husband Vladimir Borschev and other Russian colleagues on Slavic semantics