Paul Kiparsky

René Paul Victor Kiparsky
Born	(1941-01-28) January 28, 1941 Helsinki
Alma mater	MIT
Awards	Alexander von Humboldt Prize (1993) Swedish Academy Prize (2013)
Scientific career
Fields	Linguistics
Institutions	Stanford University
Doctoral advisor	Morris Halle

René Paul Victor Kiparsky (born January 28, 1941) is a Finnish professor of linguistics at Stanford University. He is the son of the Russian-born linguist and Slavicist Valentin Kiparsky.

Academic life

Kiparsky was born in Helsinki. He studied at Alabama College (now the University of Montevallo), the University of Helsinki and the University of Minnesota. Kiparsky was a student of Morris Halle at MIT, where he received his PhD in 1965. For two decades, from 1965 to 1984, he taught at MIT, and since 1984 he has taught at Stanford University, where he is Bass Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences. His PhD thesis "Phonological Change" (1965) and his subsequent work on historical linguistics helped form the modern generative view of this area. He is the founder of Lexical Phonology and Morphology (LPM) and a noted Pāṇini scholar. He made fundamental contributions to the generative theory of poetic meter and morphosyntax.

His recent work is framed in Optimality Theory, integrating insights from LPM.

He has been awarded honorary doctorates by University of Gothenburg (1985) and the University of Konstanz (2008), and received the Alexander von Humboldt Prize (1993).

In 2011 he was awarded a Senior Fellowship of the Zukunftskolleg at the University of Konstanz.

External links

• Paul Kiparsky's personal webpage