Paul J. Hopper is an American linguist of British birth. In 1973, he proposed the

glottalic theory The glottalic theory is that Proto-Indo-European had ejective stops, , instead of the plain voiced ones, as hypothesized by the usual Proto-Indo-European phonological reconstructions. A forerunner of the theory was proposed by the Danish lingu ...

regarding the reconstruction of the

Proto-Indo-European Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo-E ...

consonant inventory, in parallel with the Georgian linguist

Tamaz Gamkrelidze Tamaz (Thomas) Valerianis dze Gamkrelidze (Georgian: თამაზ ვალერიანის ძე გამყრელიძე, 23 October 1929 – 10 February 2021) was a Georgian linguist, orientalist public benefactor and Hittitol ...

and the Russian linguist Vyacheslav Ivanov. He later also became known for his theory of

emergent grammar Interactional linguistics (IL) is an interdisciplinary approach to grammar and interaction in the field of linguistics, that applies the methodology of Conversation Analysis to the study of linguistic structures, including syntax, phonetics, phonol ...

(Hopper 1987), for his contributions to the theory of

grammaticalisation In historical linguistics, grammaticalization (also known as grammatization or grammaticization) is a process of language change by which words representing objects and actions (i.e. nouns and verbs) become grammatical markers (such as affixes or p ...

and other work dealing with the interface between grammar and usage. He currently works as the Paul Mellon

Distinguished Professor Distinguished Professor is an academic title given to some top tenured professors in a university, school, or department. Some distinguished professors may have endowed chairs. In the United States Often specific to one institution, titles such ...

of Humanities at the

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

Pittsburgh Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Wester ...

, USA.

Selected publications

*(1973) Glottalized and murmured occlusives in Indo-European. ''Glotta'' 7: 141-166. *(1987) Emergent grammar. ''Berkeley Linguistics Society'' 13: 139-157. (Online on archive.org

*(1993) (with Elizabeth Closs Traugott) ''Grammaticalization''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

References

External links

Paul Hopper's page
on

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Linguists from the United States Living people Year of birth missing (living people) {{US-linguist-stub