The Heroines of Linguistics
Over the years, there have been some shockingly talented linguists. And many of them are women, because this is a field that´s dominated by women. Here are some women that really inspire us.
Joan Bybee
Joan Bybee is an American linguist and a Distinguished Professor at the University of New Mexico. She served as president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2004, and much of her work concerns grammaticalization, stochastics, modality, phonology and morphology.
This talented linguist has a bachelor's degree from the University of Texas at Austin, a master's degree from San Diego State University and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles.
Tsvia Walden
Tsvia Walden is an Israeli psycholinguist. She is a professor at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev. She was a senior lecturer at Beit Berl Academic College and Ben-Gurion University previously.
Walden specializes in social constructionism through language, language and gender, language acquisition, literacy, digital literacy and researches Jewish texts.
She is the creator and presenter of a lecture series about language instruction and language acquisition that was filmed recently.
Walden earned her doctoral degree in Psycholinguistics at Harvard University in 1981, a B.A. in Psychology, as well as a teaching certificate in French, at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where she also taught Hebrew as a second language.
Walden is married to Professor Raphael Walden, Vascular Surgeon, deputy director of the Sheba Medical Center and co-Chair of Physicians for Human Rights.
Walden was among the promoters of Whole Language, advocating the use of books rather than textbooks for reading instruction and founded the publication Written Thoughts. She also established the Child Language Center at Beit Berl College in 1984 and the Institute for Whole Language and Computers in 1996.
She was among the creators of a five episode series called London, Corner of Ben Yehuda. She was among the founders of the pluralistic Beit Midrash Kolot (Voices), where she studied and taught Jewish Texts for more than 12 years.
Walden was conferred an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew Union College in 2010. In addition to her professional work, she is involved in promoting active listening and dialogue through social issues like promoting human rights and the Middle East peace process.
Irene Heim
Irene Heim is a linguist and a specialist in semantics. She was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and UCLA. She later moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989, where she is Professor of Linguistics and former Head of the Linguistics Section of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.
She is probably most famous for her dissertation The semantics of definite and indefinite noun phrases. In this work, she argued (developing an insight by the philosopher David Lewis) that indefinite noun phrases like a cat in the sentence If a cat is not in Athens, she is in Rhodes are not quantifiers. She argues they are free variables bound by an existential operator inserted in the sentence by a semantic operation that she called existential closure.
She is also the co-author of one of the most influential textbooks in formal semantics, and is a co-editor of the journal Natural Language Semantics.
Irene Heim was awarded a Senior Fellowship of the Zukunftskolleg at the University of Konstanz in 2010.
Mary Rosamund Haas
Mary Haas passed away in 1996. She was an American linguist who specialized in North American Indian languages, Thai, and historical linguistics.
Haas undertook graduate work on comparative philology at the University of Chicago, where she studied under Edward Sapir. She later followed him to Yale.
She began a long career in linguistic fieldwork, studying many languages during her summer vacations. Over the ten-year period from 1931 to 1941, Haas studied Nitinat, Tunica, Natchez, Creek, Koasati, Choctaw, Alabama, and Hichiti, mostly languages spoken in Southeast USA.
Her first co-authored and published paper, A Visit to the Other World, a Nitinat Text, was published in 1933.
She completed her PhD in linguistics at Yale University in 1935 at age 25. Her dissertation was titled A Grammar of the Tunica Language. Tunica was once spoken in what is now the Louisiana and Mississippi areas of the USA.
In the 1930s, Haas worked with the last fluent speaker of Tunica, Sesostrie Youchigant. She produced extensive texts and vocabularies, and shortly afterwards, conducted fieldwork with Watt Sam and Nancy Raven, the last two native speakers of the Natchez language in Oklahoma.
Haas’ extensive unpublished field notes have constituted the most reliable source of information on this dead language. She conducted extensive fieldwork on the Creek language, too, and was the first modern linguist to collect extensive texts in the language.
Most of her notes on Creek and Natchez remain unpublished. However, they are being used by linguists in the 21st century.
Ofelia Zepeda
Ofelia Zepeda is a Tohono O'odham poet and intellectual. She is a professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and is well known for her efforts in the preservation of her native language and her promotion of literacy in this language.
She is the former director of the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Arizona and is also known for her work as a consultant and advocate on behalf of a number of American indigenous languages.
Her book, A Papago Grammar, is the standard textbook used to teach Tohono O'odham. She was a student of MIT linguistics professor Ken Hale, who taught her a lot and inspired her greatly.
Zepeda has worked with her tribe to improve literacy in English and Tohono O'odham. In 1983, she developed A Papago Grammar from tapes of Native speakers. No textbook previously existed for the classes she taught.
Her work with the reservation committee for Tohono O'odham language policy yielded an official policy that encourages the speaking of the Native language at all grade levels, and in 1999, she received a MacArthur Fellowship.
She is the Poet Laureate of Tucson, Arizona and she continues to serve as editor for numerous journals and book series.
Will you become an inspired, successful linguist? Are you planning to go into this field, but would love to study further? If so, you know where the master´s experts are! Right here!
1.) Fill Out Online Interview Form. 
