Barbara Hall Partee (born June 23, 1940 in Englewood, New Jersey) is a Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Linguistics and Philosophy at UMass-Amherst. She is one of the founders of contemporary formal semantics. It was through her interaction with the philosopher and logician Richard Montague in the 1970s that the research traditions of generative linguistics and formal analytic philosophy first converged. She was largely responsible for popularizing this approach to the semantics of natural languages among linguists, especially so at a time when much of the field was gripped by controversy surrounding Generative Semantics.
In recent years she has been increasingly interested in a new kind of intellectual synthesis---forging connections to the tradition of lexical semantic research as it has long been practiced in Russia.