XII Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2020

Tanya Reinhart (July 1943 – March 17, 2007) was an Israeli linguist who wrote frequently on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She contributed columns to the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot and longer articles to the CounterPunch, Znet, and Israeli Indymedia websites.

Reinhart was born in 1943 in Haifa in Mandate Palestine and raised by her mother.^[1] She studied philosophy and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem as an undergraduate, where she later received an M.A. in comparative literature and philosophy. In 1976 she obtained a Ph.D. in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her thesis supervisor was Noam Chomsky. She was active in the Communist Youth League, following in the steps of her mother.^[1]

Reinhart was a professor of linguistics and literary theory at Tel-Aviv University. She taught at MIT, Columbia University, and the University of Paris, and was also a guest lecturer at Duke University.^[2] She maintained links with Utrecht University for 15 years.^[1] After losing her position at Tel Aviv University, a move she attributed to bureaucratic harassment, she decided to leave Israel.^[1] Before her death she also said that Israel's attack on Lebanon in 2006 and on the Gaza Strip also influenced her decision.On settling in the United States she was offered a teaching appointment as Global Distinguished Professor at New York University (NYU).

She died of a stroke in her sleep on March 17, 2007 in New York City. She was 63 years old.Reinhart was married to the Hebrew-language poet Aharon Shabtai, and is buried in Israel.

Reinhart specialized in the interface and relations between meaning and context, syntax and sound systems.Noam Chomsky has described her contributions to the field of linguistics as "original and highly influential," particularly regarding "syntactic structure and operations, referential dependence, principles of lexical semantics and their implications for syntactic organization, unified approaches to cross-linguistic semantic interpretation of complex structures that appear superficially to vary widely, the theory of stress and intonation, efficient parsing systems, the interaction of internal computations with thought and sensorimotor systems, optimal design as a core principle of language, and much else."

Reinhart's academic work also extended well beyond linguistics, to that of literary theory, mass media, propaganda, and other core elements of intellectual culture.

A systematic exposition of Reinhart's Theta System, with extensive annotations and essays that capture subsequent developments.

One of Tanya Reinhart's major contributions to linguistic theory is the development of the Theta System (TS), a theory of the interface between the system of concepts and the linguistic computational system. Reinhart introduced her theory in a seminal paper, “The Theta System: Syntactic Realization of Verbal Concepts” (2000) and subsequently published other papers with further theoretical development. Although Reinhart continued to work on the Theta System, she had not completed a planned Linguistic Inquiry volume on the topic before her untimely death in 2007. This book, then, is the first to offer a systematic exposition of Reinhart's Theta System. The core of the book is Reinhart's 2000 paper, accompanied by substantial endnotes with clarifications, summaries, and links to subsequent modifications of the theory, some in Reinhart's unpublished work. An appendix by Marijana Marelj discusses the domain of Case, based on an LSA course she taught with Reinhart in 2005. Two additional essays by Reinhart's linguistic colleagues discuss the division of labor between the lexicon and syntax and the apparent conflict between the Theta System and Distributed Morphology.

In syntax languages there can be instances of lexicalized reciprocals (showing the behavior of lexical reciprocals, e.g., the discontinuous construction). These are predicates that belong to the set of reciprocals typical of lexicon languages, such as se battre ‘quarrel’ in French, or se săruta ‘kiss’ in Romanian. As expected by the Lex-syn parameter, instances of syntactic reciprocals are not found when the setting is lexicon. That is so because when the phenomenon is syntactic it is productive.

Tanya Reinhart was a world-renown theoretical linguist, who held the Interface of Language and the Systems of Use Chair at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Born in Israel, she received her B.A. and M.A. in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a widely acclaimed dissertation on The Syntactic Domain of Anaphora (1976). Previously, she taught at MIT, Columbia University, Université de Paris 8, and for over twenty years at Tel Aviv University.

Within theoretical linguistics, Dr. Reinhart was known for her work in diverse areas: syntax, semantics, discourse analysis and psycholinguistics. She was on the editorial boards of journals in diverse linguistic disciplines, such as Natural Language Semantics, Language Acquisition and Discourse Studies. Among her most influential studies are “Pragmatics and linguistics: an Analysis of Sentence Topics” in Philosophica (1981); “Reflexivity”, with Eric Reuland, in Linguistic Inquiry (1993) and “Quantifier-Scope: How labor is divided between QR and choice functions” in Linguistics and Philosophy(1997).

In recent years, Dr. Reinhart’s central area of research was the interface of the various cognitive systems that together underlie linguistic knowledge. Her book on this topic is entitled Interface Strategies (MIT Press, 2006). Throughout her career, Dr. Reinhart’s work was interdisciplinary. She also taught and published on topics in literature, art and media studies. With a specific interest in the media and politics of the Middle East, Dr. Reinhart was an Op-Ed writer for the Israeli evening paper Yediot Aharonot, and her most recent book in this area is The Roadmap to Nowhere.