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2007-2008 Fellows

Paul Kiparsky

Stanford University
Linguistics Department

Paul Kiparsky received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1965 and taught there until he joined Stanford's linguistics department in 1984. He is interested in how sounds and words are structured, how the meaning of words determines their syntactic properties, how languages change, and what all this tells us about the mind.

Project Summary

Language is the only culturally transmitted system that is subject to genuinely lawlike historical processes: phonetic change is exceptionless, and some types of change are intrinsically unidirectional and irreversible. These regularities make possible such powerful tools of historical linguistics as the comparative method of linguistic reconstruction. Although we use these remarkable properties of change freely we still don’t know why they hold; even their precise scope remains controversial. They have been attributed to speech production and perception, the discontinuity of
language transmission, and a putative innate predisposition for organizing language into particular kinds of mental structures.

I propose to develop the amphichronic approach and to apply it to some central aspects of syntax and phonology that I have previously worked on extensively from the more traditional synchronic and/or historical perspectives, and for which abundant typological, historical, and acquisition data is available. In syntax, I will focus on the devices that mark grammatical relations (case and agreement inflections, word order, and their interactions). In phonology, I have chosen
prosodic phonology (especially stress and quantity) and harmony systems.