Background
He is the son of the Russian-born linguist and Slavicist Valentin Kiparsky.
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 Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he received his Doctor of Philosophy in 1965.
Foreign two decades he taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology 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 Doctor of Philosophy thesis "Phonological Change" (1965) and his subsequent work on historical linguistics helped form the modern generative view of this area. 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. In 2011 he was awarded a Senior Fellowship of the Zukunftskolleg at the University of Konstanz.