Pauline Jacobson


Pauline Jacobson is a linguist, semantician, and professor of Linguistics at Brown University, where she has been since 1977. She is known for her work on variable free semantics, direct compositionality, and transderivationality.

Early Life and Family

Pauline Jacobson was born in 1947 to Nathan Jacobson, a Yale University mathematician, and his wife, Florence Dorfman Jacobson. She has one older brother, Michael. She was named after her paternal grandmother, Pesse Aidel Rosenberg, who died in 1941. She is Jewish. Jacobson's father was born as Nachman Arbiser in Warsaw, Poland, and immigrated to the US with his parents, Gershon Yakov Arbuser and Pauline Aidel Rosenberg. The last name Jacobson was adopted at Ellis Island by Gershon. Pauline's mother, Florence "Florie" Dorfman Jacobson was born to Aron Dorfman and Anna Dorfman . Both Aron and Anna were both born in Korostyshiv, Ukraine to Jewish parents. Aron's parents Chaim and Celia immigrated to Chicago with Aron and his siblings in the early 1900s. Florence grew up in Chicago, and was a doctoral student at the University of Chicago in 1941 when she met Nathan Jacobson. They then married in August of 1942, and moved to Baltimore.

Education

She completed her Ph.D in Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1977. Her Thesis was entitled The Syntax of Crossing Coreference Sentences. She completed her A.B. in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1968.

Honors

She has regularly taught at the summer institutes of the Linguistic Society of America and at the European [Summer School in Logic, Language and Information].
In 2022, Jacobson was inducted as a Fellow of the [Linguistic Society of America|Fellow] of the Linguistic Society of America.

Selected publications