Paul Kiparsky


René Paul Victor Kiparsky 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, 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" 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 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 and the University of Konstanz, and received the Alexander von Humboldt Prize.
In 2011 he was awarded a Senior Fellowship of the Zukunftskolleg at the University of Konstanz.