Ruth Kempson | |
|---|---|
| Born | 26 June 1944 |
| Education | SOAS (PhD) |
| Awards | FBA |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | linguistics |
| Workplaces | SOAS |
| Thesis | Presupposition and the delimitation of semantics (1973) |
| Charles Ernest Bazell | |
Other academic advisors | Randolph Quirk, Anita Mittwoch, Neil Smith, Deirdre Wilson |
Doctoral students | John Saeed |
Ruth Margaret Kempson, FBA (born 26 June 1944) is a British linguist. She is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at King's College, London.
In 1977, Kempson published Semantic Theory, which discusses the concept of entailment in linguistics. A proposition (P) is entailed by another (Q) if P is true when Q is true and Q is false when P is false, but Q is not strictly defined if P is true. She was awarded a Fellow of the British Academy in 1989. She has made contributions to the theoretical framework of Dynamic syntax.