Ter Meulen was born in Amsterdam on 4 March 1952. She studied philosophy and linguistics at the University of Amsterdam, earning a bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1972 and master's degrees in philosophy and linguistics in 1976, all three degrees cum laude. She was granted a Ph.D. in philosophy of language at Stanford University in 1980; her dissertation, Substances, quantities and individuals: A study in the formal semantics of mass terms, was jointly supervised by mathematical logician Jon Barwise and philosopher Julius Moravcsik.[2]
After postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and University of Groningen, she became an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Washington in 1984, and was tenured in 1989. She moved to Indiana University Bloomington as an associate professor of Philosophy and Linguistics in 1989 and was promoted to full professor in 1996. She taught at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Utrecht, before moving to the University of Groningen in 1998, where she was appointed Professor of Modern English Linguistics, and given a personal chair in Semantic Theory and Cognitive Science in 2004. In 2009, she came to the University of Geneva as a research professor, from which she retired in 2016. She held visiting appointments at the University of Bucharest in Romania, and at the Beijing University of Languages and Linguistics.
From 2003 to 2008 she was a member of the Dutch national science foundation NWO non-executive board, focusing on women scientist career prospects, ethnic minority recruitment for science, financial oversight and international relations. She served on numerous selection committees, international review boards for academic programs, and advisory boards in academia.[2]
Books
Ter Meulen is the author or coauthor of:
Mathematical Methods in Linguistics (with Barbara Partee and Robert E. Wall, Kluwer, 1990).[3]
Representing Time in Natural Language: The Dynamic Interpretation of Tense and Aspect (MIT Press, 1995)[4]
^Reviews of Mathematical Methods in Linguistics:
Bill Black, Machine Translation, JSTOR40006913;
Brendan S. Gillon, Canadian Journal of Linguistics, doi:10.1017/S0008413100014857;
Lawrence S. Moss, Journal of Symbolic Logic, doi:10.2307/2275199, JSTOR2275199;
Geoffrey K. Pullum, Journal of Linguistics, JSTOR4176136;
Alexis Manaster Ramer, Computational Linguistics, [1]
^Reviews of Handbook of Logic and Language:
M. J. Cresswell, Studia Logica, JSTOR20016114;
Brendan S. Gillon, Canadian Journal of Linguistics, doi:10.1017/S0008413100022763;
Natasha Kurtonina, Journal of Logic, Language and Information, JSTOR40180211
^Review of The Composition of Meaning:
Michael T. Putnam, Journal of Germanic Linguistics, doi:10.1017/S1470542706220063