Ruth Berman (née Aronson, born 1935 in Cape Town, South Africa) is an Israeli linguist, Professor Emerita, Tel Aviv University, where she held the chair in “Language across the Lifespan.” Berman's research deals with the morphology, syntax, and lexicon of Modern Hebrew, first language acquisition in cross-linguistic perspective, later language development, and development of narrative and text construction abilities from early childhood across adolescence and adulthood.
Personal
Ruth Aronson (later Berman) grew up in Cape Town, South Africa. She received a B.A. degree summa cum laude from the University of Cape Town in Languages and Literature (1954), the M.A. degree from Columbia University, New York, in General and Applied Linguistics (1964), and the Ph.D. from Hebrew University, Jerusalem, in Hebrew Language and Linguistics (1973).
Aronson immigrated to Israel in 1954. She was married to Yitzchak (Isadore) Berman of Moshav Beit Herut, with whom she had one daughter. Berman now resides in Tel Aviv with her partner, Israel Prize laureate, architect Yaacov Yaar.
Academic career
In the 1950s and 1960s, Berman taught English as a Second Language, initially at a high school in Beersheva, then in English teacher training and supervision in high schools in the Negev and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She was first exposed to the field of linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, on a grant from the British Council (1958–59). Her studies under the British linguists Firth and Halliday led to her participation in a large-scale research project on the teaching of English as a foreign language in Israel, supervised by Prof. Gina Ortar, at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. In 1965, she began her decades-long career at Tel Aviv University, which included coordinating the compilation of the “English for Speakers of Hebrew” series of textbooks based on the principles of Hebrew-English Contrastive Linguistics. This project was conducted in the framework of the Department of English, in which Aronson-Berman established a language program based on contemporary linguistic theories that evolved into the Department of Linguistics of Tel Aviv University.
In the 1970s, Berman’s focus of interest shifted to Modern Hebrew – in morphology, lexicon, and syntax. Her doctoral dissertation (1973) investigated a range of verbal nouns in Modern Hebrew in the framework of current transformational syntactic theory. This provided the groundwork for an English-language publication on the structure of Modern Hebrew (1978) – dealing not only with nominalizations, but also with issues such as tense-aspect and the Hebrew system of binyan verb patterns – a study that to this day is a key source of reference for researchers in relevant domains. During this period, Berman also published numerous articles in English and Hebrew on various aspects of Modern Hebrew language.