René Paul Victor Kiparsky | |
---|---|
Born |
Helsinki |
January 28, 1941
Fields | Linguistics |
Institutions | Stanford University |
Alma mater | MIT |
Doctoral advisor | Morris Halle |
Notable awards | Alexander von Humboldt Prize (1993) Swedish Academy Prize (2013) |
René Paul Victor Kiparsky (born January 28, 1941, Helsinki, Finland) is a professor of linguistics at Stanford University. He is the son of the Russian-born linguist and Slavicist Valentin Kiparsky.
He studied at Alabama College (now the University of Montevallo) and the University of Helsinki and University of Minnesota. Kiparsky was a student of Morris Halle at MIT where he received his PhD in 1965. For two decades he taught at MIT from 1965 to 1984, 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).