Paul Kiparsky
Biographic Data
| ID | 740265 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paul Kiparsky |
| GIVEN NAMES | Paul |
| FAMILY NAME | Kiparsky |
| SIGNATURE | KIPARSKY P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stanford University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 268 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1967 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Hard Choices: Sound Change in Northern Greek
We propose a new account of the change from -Vsis, -Vzis to -Vi̯s in Modern Lesbian, as well as of related changes in other Northern Greek dialects, arguing that they are special cases of the loss of unstressed high vowels. Our analysis depends on the new understanding of the nature of sound change that nonlinear phonology and Optimality Theory jointly make available.
Retrospect and Prospect
In science, we look for the big picture, but in autobiography, it is the details that we care more about. Inevitably, my piece embodies this contradiction. The linguistic parts aim to bring out the unifying themes behind what may look like a hopelessly all-over-the-place curriculum vitae of research and teaching. The autobiographical parts are mostly vignettes of my formative years, places where I have lived, events that have made an impression o…
Phonology to the rescue: Nez Perce morphology revisited
Minimalist Morphology predicts that allomorphy is conditioned inward and locally, and that the domains of morphosyntactically and phonologically conditioned allomorphy selection are identical. Amy Rose Deal and Matthew Wolf have put forward two cases of allomorphy in Nez Perce that appear to be conditioned by an outward phonological context. I present an analysis of Nez Perce morphology and phonology which supports the conclusion that the first c…
Stress, Meter, and Text-Setting
Verse meter organizes prominence-marking categories into isochronous and binary hierarchical rhythmic structures, subject to principles that are rooted in the faculty of language, stylized in verbal art, and manifested in a generalized and more abstract form in music and dance. This chapter outlines a theory of constraint-based generative metrics, and sketches out how it represents metrical structure and derives the typology of metrical systems. …
Level ordering and opacity in Tetsǫ́t’ıné: A Stratal OT account
Dene (Athabaskan) verbs are widely known for their complex morphophonology. The most complex patterns are associated with two conjugation markers, /s/ and /n/, which are associated with a floating H tone to their immediate left. In this paper, we provide an analysis of /θe/ and /ɲe/, the reflexes of the /s/ and /n/ conjugations in Tetsǫ́t’ıné. Whereas previous accounts of these conjugations have relied heavily on morphological conditioning, we sh…
Metered Verse
Generative metrics studies versification as a stylization of phonological form. This review article outlines its main goals, hypotheses, and findings and presents a template-matching version of it, which models meters as mappings of abstract verse patterns to their permissible linguistic instantiations. It lays out the key features that verse rhythm shares with rhythm in other cognitive domains and distinguishes it from biological rhythms, offeri…
Indo-European Origins of the Greek Hexameter
Livonian stød
Labov, sound change, and phonological theory
Labov's empirical vindication of the neogrammarian hypothesis, his critique of functionalist accounts of sound change, and his formal principles governing vowel shifts, mergers and splits are major contributions towards solving the constraints problem in historical phonology. I explore their implications for phonological theory, and show that they connect with recent developments in Optimality Theory in mutually illuminating ways
Phonologization
Fact
Towards a null theory of the passive
Greek Anaphora in Cross-Linguistic Perspective
The Homeric and Classical Greek systems of referentially dependent pronouns support an approach to binding and anaphoric reference which characterizes pronouns by two cross-classifying features, which specify the maximal domain in which their antecedent must be located, and whether they can overlap in reference with a coargument (Kiparsky 2002). By treating reflexivity as a special case of referential dependency, this approach predicts a class of…
Dvandvas, blocking, and the associative: The bumpy ride from phrase to word
The oldest form of Sanskrit has a class of expressions that are in some respects like asyndeti-cally coordinated syntactic phrases, in other respects like single compound words. I propose to resolve the conflicting evidence by drawing on prosodic phonology, stratal optimality theory, and the lexicalist approach to morphological blocking. I then present an account of the semantic properties and the historical development of these expressions. The …
The Old High German weak preterite
The Nature of the Word: Studies in Honor of Paul Kiparsky (Current Studies in Linguistics)
The Amphichronic Program vs. Evolutionary Phonology
1. Synchronic and historical explanation Evolutionary Phonology . Evolutionary Phonology seeks to derive typological generalizations from recurrent patterns of language change, themselves assumed to be rooted in perception, production, and acquisition. The goal is to eliminate UG by providing diachronic explanations for the cross-linguistic evidence that has been used to motivate it
The Vedic Injunctive: Historical and Synchronic Implications
Early Vedic possesses a chameleon-like verb form called the injunctive, whose uses partly overlap with, and alternate with, those of the subjunctive, optative and imperative moods, and with the past and present tenses. Being morphologically tenseless and moodless, the injunctive has attracted interest from a comparative Indo-European perspective because it appears to be an archaic layer of the finite verb morphology. Its place and function in the…
Where Stochastic OT fails: A discrete model of metrical variation
Clitics and clause structure: The Late Medieval Greek system
We rebut Pappas’s critique (this issue) of our treatment of Late Medieval Greek clausal syntax and clitic placement (Condoravdi & Kiparsky 2001), point out some weaknesses of his counterproposal, and suggest directions for further research
Towards a typology of disharmony
We propose an OT-theoretic typology of vowel harmony systems based on a comparative study of front/back harmony. Harmony processes are governed by a general constraint that imposes feature agreement on neighboring segments. Disharmonic (“neutral”) segments arise when this constraint is dominated by markedness constraints and/or by faithfulness constraints that govern segment inventories. These constraint interactions determine whether disharmonic…
Clitics and clause structure
In late Medieval Greek and many modern dialects, pronominal clitics are syntactically adjoined to an IP projection. In another set of dialects they have become syntactically adjoined to a verbal head. In the most innovating dialects (which include Standard Greek) they are agreement affixes. Extending the Fontana/Halpern clitic typology, we propose a trajectory of lexicalization from X max clitics via X 0 clitics to lexical affixes. The evolution …
Structural case in finnish
Opacity and cyclicity
Cyclic phonology-morphology interactions and opacity have been dealt with in strictly parallelist OT by introducing new constraint types, including Base-Output constraints and Sympathy. An alternative OT approach to the phonology-morphology interface is a constraint-based version of Lexical Phonology and Morphology (LPM), in which stems, words, and sentences are subject to separate, serially related OT constraint systems. I show that OT-based LPM…
Forum
Die generative Syntax wiederum hat in den vergangenen .Jahren entscheidende Einflsse durch das sogenannte "Minimalistische Pro
Opacity and cyclicity
Cyclic phonology-morphology interactions and opacity have been dealt with in strictly parallelist OT by introducing new constraint types, including Base-Output constraints and Sympathy. An alternative OT approach to the phonology-morphology interface is a constraint-based version of Lexical Phonology and Morphology (LPM), in which stems, words, and sentences are subject to separate, serially related OT constraint systems. I show that OT-based LPM…
Some consequences of Lexical Phonology
Phonological theory in recent years can be said to have undergone a ‘modularisation’ in several respects. The formal theory is no longer expected to explain everything about phonology by itself: generalisations about phonological change which previously were used to motivate constraints on abstractness or opacity have turned out to make more sense as effects of real-time language acquisition and use. Secondly, phonological representations have be…
Structural case in finnish
Stress, Syntax, and Meter
The way stress is patterned in English verse depends on word and phrase structure, according to strict rules which are not accounted for by either traditional or more recent metrics. This paper is a contribution to the exploration of these rules, and an attempt to develop a formal metrical theory capable of expressing them. The presentation is organized as follows. After an introductory review of some of the problems and proposed solutions in met…
A Parametric Theory of Poetic Meter
This paper presents a parametric theory of poetic meter which defines a set of formally possible meters based on the prosodic constituents and categories given by universal grammar, and a functional principle that selects an optimal meter for a particular language on the basis of its lexical phonological structure. We support this theory by a detailed analysis of a favored meter in Finnish, a stress-based meter in which syllable count varies in a…
Clitics and clause structure
In late Medieval Greek and many modern dialects, pronominal clitics are syntactically adjoined to an IP projection. In another set of dialects they have become syntactically adjoined to a verbal head. In the most innovating dialects (which include Standard Greek) they are agreement affixes. Extending the Fontana/Halpern clitic typology, we propose a trajectory of lexicalization from X max clitics via X 0 clitics to lexical affixes. The evolution …
Towards a null theory of the passive
Clitics and clause structure: The Late Medieval Greek system
We rebut Pappas’s critique (this issue) of our treatment of Late Medieval Greek clausal syntax and clitic placement (Condoravdi & Kiparsky 2001), point out some weaknesses of his counterproposal, and suggest directions for further research
A propos de l'histoire de l'accentuation grecque
Kiparsky Paul. A propos de l'histoire de l'accentuation grecque. In: Langages, 2e année, n°8, 1967. La phonologie générative, sous la direction de Sanford A. Schane. pp. 73-93
Greek Anaphora in Cross-Linguistic Perspective
The Homeric and Classical Greek systems of referentially dependent pronouns support an approach to binding and anaphoric reference which characterizes pronouns by two cross-classifying features, which specify the maximal domain in which their antecedent must be located, and whether they can overlap in reference with a coargument (Kiparsky 2002). By treating reflexivity as a special case of referential dependency, this approach predicts a class of…
Dvandvas, blocking, and the associative: The bumpy ride from phrase to word
The oldest form of Sanskrit has a class of expressions that are in some respects like asyndeti-cally coordinated syntactic phrases, in other respects like single compound words. I propose to resolve the conflicting evidence by drawing on prosodic phonology, stratal optimality theory, and the lexicalist approach to morphological blocking. I then present an account of the semantic properties and the historical development of these expressions. The …
Sonorant Clusters in Greek
The split of IE * VRs and * VsR into VRR in Lesbian and Thessalian and VR in the other dialects cuts a striking isogloss through ancient Greece. This split may be related to other developments of Greek by applying Jakobson's feature system to four Greek sound changes, all of them in essence well known and widely accepted. It is then shown that this suffices to solve, with no modification of the rules, the problem of the reflexes of IE * ws and * …
Labov, sound change, and phonological theory
Labov's empirical vindication of the neogrammarian hypothesis, his critique of functionalist accounts of sound change, and his formal principles governing vowel shifts, mergers and splits are major contributions towards solving the constraints problem in historical phonology. I explore their implications for phonological theory, and show that they connect with recent developments in Optimality Theory in mutually illuminating ways
Histoire de l'accentuation Slave
Commentary
Sonorant Clusters in Greek
The split of IE * VRs and * VsR into VRR in Lesbian and Thessalian and VR in the other dialects cuts a striking isogloss through ancient Greece. This split may be related to other developments of Greek by applying Jakobson's feature system to four Greek sound changes, all of them in essence well known and widely accepted. It is then shown that this suffices to solve, with no modification of the rules, the problem of the reflexes of IE * ws and * …
A propos de l'histoire de l'accentuation grecque
Kiparsky Paul. A propos de l'histoire de l'accentuation grecque. In: Langages, 2e année, n°8, 1967. La phonologie générative, sous la direction de Sanford A. Schane. pp. 73-93
Commentary
The Inflectional Accent in Indo-European
In Indo-European languages with mobile paradigmatic accent, fixed oxytones and movable athematic stems are accented by the same rule. When applied to syllables as accentual units, this rule generates the Sanskrit accent patterns. When applied to moras, it generates the Greek accent patterns—including, as a special case of mobility, the paradigmatic alternation of acute and circumflex. A modification of the the same rule accounts for the extension…
Stress, Syntax, and Meter
The way stress is patterned in English verse depends on word and phrase structure, according to strict rules which are not accounted for by either traditional or more recent metrics. This paper is a contribution to the exploration of these rules, and an attempt to develop a formal metrical theory capable of expressing them. The presentation is organized as follows. After an introductory review of some of the problems and proposed solutions in met…
Histoire de l'accentuation Slave
Explanation in Phonology
Explanation in Phonology
Panini as a Variationist
Some consequences of Lexical Phonology
Phonological theory in recent years can be said to have undergone a ‘modularisation’ in several respects. The formal theory is no longer expected to explain everything about phonology by itself: generalisations about phonological change which previously were used to motivate constraints on abstractness or opacity have turned out to make more sense as effects of real-time language acquisition and use. Secondly, phonological representations have be…
Pāṇini as a Variationist
Rhythm and meter
Indo-European Origins of Germanic Syntax
In accord with the standard analysis I assume that verb-second and verb-first order in Germanic1 is derived by movement of the finite verb to a.vacant C0 position (den Besten (1983)).2 I shall argue that in English and in the early Germanic languages the Specifier of CP is a focus position, which hosts whphrases, demonstratives, and negation. This specifier position can in turn be preceded by a topicalized/left dislocated element adjoined to CP; …
A Parametric Theory of Poetic Meter
This paper presents a parametric theory of poetic meter which defines a set of formally possible meters based on the prosodic constituents and categories given by universal grammar, and a functional principle that selects an optimal meter for a particular language on the basis of its lexical phonological structure. We support this theory by a detailed analysis of a favored meter in Finnish, a stress-based meter in which syllable count varies in a…
Forum
Die generative Syntax wiederum hat in den vergangenen .Jahren entscheidende Einflsse durch das sogenannte "Minimalistische Pro
Opacity and cyclicity
Cyclic phonology-morphology interactions and opacity have been dealt with in strictly parallelist OT by introducing new constraint types, including Base-Output constraints and Sympathy. An alternative OT approach to the phonology-morphology interface is a constraint-based version of Lexical Phonology and Morphology (LPM), in which stems, words, and sentences are subject to separate, serially related OT constraint systems. I show that OT-based LPM…
Structural case in finnish
Clitics and clause structure
In late Medieval Greek and many modern dialects, pronominal clitics are syntactically adjoined to an IP projection. In another set of dialects they have become syntactically adjoined to a verbal head. In the most innovating dialects (which include Standard Greek) they are agreement affixes. Extending the Fontana/Halpern clitic typology, we propose a trajectory of lexicalization from X max clitics via X 0 clitics to lexical affixes. The evolution …
Towards a typology of disharmony
We propose an OT-theoretic typology of vowel harmony systems based on a comparative study of front/back harmony. Harmony processes are governed by a general constraint that imposes feature agreement on neighboring segments. Disharmonic (“neutral”) segments arise when this constraint is dominated by markedness constraints and/or by faithfulness constraints that govern segment inventories. These constraint interactions determine whether disharmonic…
Clitics and clause structure: The Late Medieval Greek system
We rebut Pappas’s critique (this issue) of our treatment of Late Medieval Greek clausal syntax and clitic placement (Condoravdi & Kiparsky 2001), point out some weaknesses of his counterproposal, and suggest directions for further research
The Vedic Injunctive: Historical and Synchronic Implications
Early Vedic possesses a chameleon-like verb form called the injunctive, whose uses partly overlap with, and alternate with, those of the subjunctive, optative and imperative moods, and with the past and present tenses. Being morphologically tenseless and moodless, the injunctive has attracted interest from a comparative Indo-European perspective because it appears to be an archaic layer of the finite verb morphology. Its place and function in the…
Where Stochastic OT fails: A discrete model of metrical variation
The Amphichronic Program vs. Evolutionary Phonology
1. Synchronic and historical explanation Evolutionary Phonology . Evolutionary Phonology seeks to derive typological generalizations from recurrent patterns of language change, themselves assumed to be rooted in perception, production, and acquisition. The goal is to eliminate UG by providing diachronic explanations for the cross-linguistic evidence that has been used to motivate it
The Nature of the Word: Studies in Honor of Paul Kiparsky (Current Studies in Linguistics)
The Old High German weak preterite
Philosophy (27 works) · Linguistics (24 works) · Phonetics and Phonology Research (15 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · History (13 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (13 works) · Phonology (11 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (11 works) · Linguistics and language evolution (10 works) · Psychology (10 works)