Angelika Kratzer

Angelika Kratzer is a professor emerita of linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Biography She was born in Germany, and received her PhD from the University of Konstanz in 1979, with a dissertation entitled Semantik der Rede. She is an influential and widely cited semanticist whose expertise includes modals, conditionals, situation semantics, and a range of topics relating to the syntax–semantics interface.

Among her most influential ideas are: a unified analysis of modality of different flavors (building on the work of Jaakko Hintikka); a modal analysis of conditionals; and the hypothesis ("the little v hypothesis") that the agent argument of a transitive verb is introduced syntactically whereas the theme argument is selected for lexically.

She co-wrote with Irene Heim the semantics textbook Semantics in Generative Grammar, and is co-editor, with Irene Heim, of the journal Natural Language Semantics.

Awards

In 2012, Kratzer was named a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America.

Selected publications