Mira Ariel (Hebrew: ÃÂÃÂèàÃÂèÃÂÃÂÃÂ) is a professor of linguistics at Tel Aviv University, specializing in pragmatics. A pioneer of the study of information structure, she is best known for creating and developing Accessibility Theory.
After completing a BA in linguistics and English literature at Tel Aviv University in 1976, Ariel studied at the University of Pennsylvania, where she graduated with an MA in 1978. Ariel returned to Tel Aviv University in 1979 to pursue her PhD studies. She was advised by Tanya Reinhart and Ellen Prince and was awarded her PhD in 1986 with a dissertation entitled, Givenness marking. She subsequently spent a brief period as honorary research fellow in sociolinguistics at the University of London.
Ariel was hired as Lecturer at Tel Aviv University in 1988 and spent her whole career there, reaching the rank of full professor in 2006.
From 2018 to 2019, she served as President of the Societas Linguistica Europaea.
In 2021 she was elected as a member of the Academia Europaea.
ArielâÂÂs research deals with issues in pragmatics and at the semantics-pragmatics interface and is mainly concerned with linguistic manifestations of reference to entities in discourse. Her body of work on Accessibility Theory makes the case that the language userâÂÂs choice of anaphora is governed by the notion of accessibility in memory. ArielâÂÂs accessibility marking scale proceeds from low to high accessibility in the following order:
Ariel's Accessibility Theory has been influential in a wide variety of domains beyond pragmatics, including cognitive linguistics, linguistic typology, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, language acquisition, poetics, psycholinguistics, and natural language processing.