Susan Rothstein#

Biography#

Susan Rothstein was born and grew up in the UK. She completed a BA Hons. Degree in Philosophy and Modern Languages at Oxford University in 1979 and was awarded a Ph.D. in Linguistics from MIT in 1983 for her dissertation ‘The Syntactic Forms of Predication’. After two years teaching at the College of William and Mary (Virgina, USA), she moved to Israel and took up a position at Bar-Ilan University in 1985. She was made Full Professor of Linguistics in 1999. She was a visitor at the Utrecht University in 2001-2002, and at Leiden University in 2008-2010.

She is the author of two monographs, and more than 50 papers including more than 20 in international journals. She has edited or co-edited four volumes of papers. She is also the editor of the series ‘Explorations in Semantics’, published by Wiley (Blackwell), and is on the editorial board of Linguistic Inquiry, ‘Journal of Semantics’, ‘The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition’, ‘Logic and Communication, Semantics and Pragmatics’. She participates frequently in international conferences, and has been and invited or keynote speaker at over twenty international conferences, in Europe, the USA, South America and the Far East. She was President of the Israel Association of Theoretical Linguistics (2002-2004).

She has supervised over ten Ph.D. dissertations, and more than fifteen MA theses.

Susan Rothstein’s work is in formal semantics and the semantics/syntax interface. She has worked on theories of predication, aspect, the count/mass distinction, and bare noun phrases. In the last five years, she has been investigating these questions from a crosslinguistic perspective, exploring how language specific morphosyntactic properties constrain the expression of central semantic concepts, including the expression of aspects and contrasts between counting and measuring. She is currently working on a book, "Number and Numericals: Towards a Grammar of Counting and Measuring" to appear with Cambridge University Press.

Recently, she has begun a collaboration with Professor Alessandro Treves, a computational neuroscientist at SISSA (Italy), investigating cognitive and computational aspects of the mass/count distinctions.

She lives in Tel Aviv with her husband Fred Landman, their daughter Dafna, and Ronya, the family cat.