Paul Kiparsky - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Paul Kiparsky

Language, 1995

A method for connecting pipe sections having a corrosion-resistant lining in which a pair of sock... more A method for connecting pipe sections having a corrosion-resistant lining in which a pair of sockets are connected at small diameter ends substantially equal to the outer diameter of the pipe sections to the latter, spaced from facing ends of the pipe sections with the remainder thereof, a larger diameter portion of each socket, projecting beyond the end of the respective pipe section, in which a sleeve of a material resistant to heat and to the corrosive influence of the liquid to be conveyed is placed between adjacent ends of two pipe sections, and in which the other ends of the sockets are connected to each other by at least one weld seam which is thus radially spaced from the pipe sections and the lining thereon so that the lining is not damaged by heat during forming of the weld seam. After forming of the weld seam the space between the sockets and the pipe portions enclosed thereby is filled with a molten hardenable compound having a melting point lower than that of the pipe lining, and which, however, can not damage said lining.

A Tribute to Roman Jakobson 1896-1982

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Modern Languages. Thesis. 1965. Ph.D.Ph.D

Gunter Narr Verlag, 2005

This condensed review of recent trends and developments in historical linguistics proceeds from t... more This condensed review of recent trends and developments in historical linguistics proceeds from the empirical to the conceptual, from 'what' to 'how' to 'why'. I begin with new findings about the origins, relationships, and diversity of the world's languages, then turn to the processes and mechanisms of change as they concern practicing historical linguists, continue with efforts to ground change in the acquisition, use, and structure of language, and conclude with a look at ongoing debates concerning the explanatory division of labor between historical and theoretical linguistics and ways to unify historical and theoretical linguistics. The emphasis throughout is on current research rather than on established textbook knowledge. * Thanks to Andrew Garrett, Alex Jaker, and John Rickford for generously sharing their expertise, and to Phil Branigan for his eagle eye. Remaining errors are on me. 1 Uralic has a new look, with no "Finno-Ugric" branch and a new place for Saami (

The dental preterite of weak verbs remains one of the most troublesome chapters of Germanic histo... more The dental preterite of weak verbs remains one of the most troublesome chapters of Germanic historical-comparative grammar. The morphological provenience of its dental formative-d- has been debated for nearly two centuries, and there is still no consensus on whether it is a reflex of one or more of the Indo-European dental

Paradigms that combine synthetic (one-word) and periphrastic forms in complementary distribution ... more Paradigms that combine synthetic (one-word) and periphrastic forms in complementary distribution have loomed large in discussions of morphological blocking (McCloskey and Hale 1983, Poser 1986, Andrews 1990). Such composite paradigms potentially challenge the lexicalist claim that words and sentences are organized by distinct subsystems of grammar. They are of course grist for the mill of Distributed Morphology, a theory which revels in every kind of interpenetration of morphology and syntax. But they have prompted even Paradigm Function Morphologists to introduce syntactic constructions into their morphology. I shall argue, instead, for a lexicalist treatment, which is based on the idea that blocking is a filtering device that applies to the output of the generative system, rather than operating directly on its derivations (Wunderlich 1996). I present this approach to blocking in section 1, and show in section 2 how it deals with the intricate composite verb paradigm of Latin, wher...

During a brief encounter with a Livonian sailor on the Copehagen waterfront, Vilhelm Thomsen noti... more During a brief encounter with a Livonian sailor on the Copehagen waterfront, Vilhelm Thomsen noticed in his speech a prosodic feature, found in no other Balto-Finnic language, which he instantly identified with the stød of his own native Danish. 1 In the few hours that he was able to spend with the seaman, Thomsen accurately identified the essentials of the Livonian stød’s distribution, noting that it occurs in heavy syllables that end in what he called a “sonant coefficient ” and that it interacts with quantitative gradation in morphological paradigms. His observations, which appeared as a last-minute addendum to his famous Beröringer (Thomsen 1890:58-63), were confirmed and extended through extensive work on Livonian by Finnish linguists in the interwar decades. They produced a magnificent Livonian dictionary, from which most

1 Plato’s problem in lexical semantics Word meaning confronts us, as acutely as anything in synta... more 1 Plato’s problem in lexical semantics Word meaning confronts us, as acutely as anything in syntax, with what Chomsky has called Plato’s problem. 1 We know far more about the meaning of almost any word than we could have learned just from our exposure to uses of it. Communication would be unbearably laborious if we did not share with other speakers the ability to generalize the meanings of words in the right ways. As Fodor (1981) notes in arguing for the innateness of lexical semantics, the most we might plausibly have learned about meaning of the verb paint is that it means something like “to cover with paint”. Even if we have only seen this done with a brush, we have no hesitation in applying the verb correctly to novel techniques of painting, such as rolling, spraying, or dipping. But when a vat of paint explodes in a paint factory, covering everyone with paint, or when Velázquez dips his brush in a pot of burnt sienna, we know that the sentences in [1] would not be legitimate re...

The transition from Middle English to Modern English in the second half of the 14th century is a ... more The transition from Middle English to Modern English in the second half of the 14th century is a turning point in the syntax of the language. It is at once the point when several constraints on nominal arguments that had been

Analogy, Levelling, Markedness, 2003

The Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics (2005), 2005

The Handbook of Historical Linguistics

Tout est psychologique dans la linguistique, y compris ce qui est mécanique et matériel.

More than Words, 2002

Obviation versus Blocking. Two approaches to the distribution of anaphors and pronominals have be... more Obviation versus Blocking. Two approaches to the distribution of anaphors and pronominals have been explored in Binding Theory. The OBVIATION approach, originating in Lasnik 1976 and extensively developed in the GB tradition, posits autonomous disjoint reference principles which directly filter out illicit coindexations in certain structural domains. The BLOCKING approach treats disjoint reference derivatively, by making anaphors obligatory under coreference in the binding domain, and invoking a syntactic or pragmatic principle that forces disjoint reference pronominals in the "elsewhere" case. 1 1 My interest in reflexive pronouns comes partly from historical syntax and partly from the Case theory that Dieter Wunderlich and I have been thinking about since 1991. The first version of this paper was written that year, and I was fortunate to be able to discuss it with Dieter at the time, who made insightful suggestions especially about the Swedish material. I then set it aside for some years, realizing that many of the things I was trying to do were being done in a more sophisticated way by Reinhart & Reuland and by Burzio. Still, my conclusions differed from theirs on some points, and so I returned to the paper in 1996, adding the OT analysis, which was presented at an OT syntax conference at Stanford, and revising it once more for this publication in honor of Dieter Wunderlich. I am grateful to Cleo Condoravdi for her detailed comments on several drafts of this paper and for her advice and encouragement over the years. Special thanks also to Annie Zaenen and Peter Sells for their guidance, and to Ekkehard König and Tomas Riad for the interest they have take in this work. Many people have been generous with their time and linguistic expertise:

Rules, Constraints, and Phonological Phenomena, 2008

Compared to more familiar varieties of Swedish, the dialects spoken in Finland have rather divers... more Compared to more familiar varieties of Swedish, the dialects spoken in Finland have rather diverse syllable structures. The distribution of distinctive syllable weight is determined by grammatical factors, and by varying effects of final consonant weightlessness. In turn it constrains several gemination processes which create derived superheavy syllables, in an unexpected way which provides evidence for an anti-neutralization constraint. Stratal OT, which integrates OT with Lexical Phonology, sheds light on these complex quantity systems.

Theoretical Linguistics, 2006

The Linguistic Review, 2000

Phonological opacity and paradigmatic effects ("synchronic analogy") have long been of interest i... more Phonological opacity and paradigmatic effects ("synchronic analogy") have long been of interest in relation to change, naturalness, and the phonology/morphology interface. Their investigation has now acquired a new urgency, because they call into question OT's postulate that constraints are evaluated in parallel. Conceptually, parallelism is one of the basic and most interesting tenets of OT, and so there are good methodological reasons to try hard to save it in the face of such recalcitrant data. The price to be paid for it is the introduction of otherwise unneeded powerful new types of Faithfulness constraints, such as Output/Output (O/O) constraints, Paradigm Uniformity constraints, and Sympathy constraints, which have turned out to compromise the OT program very severely.

The Linguistic Review, 2003

We propose an OT-theoretic typology of vowel harmony systems based on a comparative study of fron... more 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 segments are opaque or transparent, and fix the cross-linguistically diverse behavior of the latter. We make crucial use of two modes of local constraint conjunction, which are already implicit in the current theory. Our proposal restricts this theory by eliminating the possibility of freely stipulating the domain of local conjunction.