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 (Verso, 2006).