Barbara Hall Partee is a Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass). She is known as a pioneer in the field of formal semantics. Born in Englewood, New Jersey, Partee grew up in the Baltimore area. She attended Swarthmore College, where she majored in mathematics with minors in Russian and philosophy. She did her graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Noam Chomsky. Her 1965 PhD dissertation from MIT was entitled Subject and Object in Modern English. Partee began her professorial career at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1965 as an assistant professor of linguistics. She taught there until 1972, when she transferred to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, soon becoming a full professor. During her time at UMass Amherst, she taught numerous students who became notable linguists, including Gennaro Chierchia, Irene Heim, and Laurence Horn. She retired from UMass in September 2004. Through her interactions with the philosopher and logician Richard Montague at UCLA in the 1970s, she played an important role in bringing together the research traditions of generative linguistics, formal logic, and analytic philosophy, pursuing an agenda pioneered by David Lewis in his 1970 article "General Semantics". She helped popularize Montague grammar among linguists in the United States, especially at a time when there was a lot of uncertainty about the relation between syntax and semantics. She is one of the founders of contemporary formal semantics in the United States and the author of a number of influential works. In her later years, she has become 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.

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