Pauline (Polly) Jacobson (born 9 July 1947) 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.
Pauline Jacobson was born in 1947 to Nathan Jacobson (1910-1999), a Yale University mathematician, and his wife, Florence Dorfman Jacobson (1918-1996). She has one older brother, Michael. She was named after her paternal grandmother, Pesse (later Pauline) Aidel (Ida) Rosenberg, who died in 1941. She is Jewish. Jacobson's father was born as Nachman Arbiser (Arbisar) in Warsaw, Poland, and immigrated to the US with his parents, Gershon Yakov Arbuser (son of Chaim Arbiser and Ruckla Kinsberg) and Pauline Aidel Rosenberg. The last name Jacobson was adopted at Ellis Island by Gershon (who later went by Charles Jacobson). Pauline's mother, Florence "Florie" Dorfman Jacobson was born to Aron Dorfman (the son of Chaim Dorfman and Celia [Sylvia] Becker) and Anna Dorfman (née Schwartzman) (daughter of Israel and Pearl Schwartzman). Both Aron and Anna were 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.
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.
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 (ESSLLI).
In 2022, Jacobson was inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America.