Dr. Paul Hopper

Biography

Paul Hopper is the Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Carnegie Mellon University. His research and teaching have centered on the connections between rhetoric (discourse) and grammar (linguistic structure). He is particularly interested in the implications of the ideas broached in his work since 1988, where he explores how the structure of language 'emerges' through favored word groupings in discourse. His collaboration with Stanford linguist Elizabeth Traugott is noted in the book 'Grammaticalization' published by Cambridge in 1993, which describes the typical historical sources and trajectories that inform grammar in language. Hopper's work critiques standard assumptions from a linguistic perspective and he is fascinated by the structural differences across languages, leading him to various projects, including comparative studies of Indo-European and Malayo-Polynesian languages, as well as discourse analysis related to human-ape communication. He has published numerous articles and written or edited books in the realms of Indo-European and Germanic philology and Malay discourse. Additionally, he has served as the editor of the journal Language Sciences and on the executive committees of the Modern Language Association's Language Theory section and the Linguistic Society of America. His accolades include being the Collitz Professor at the LSA's Linguistics Institute and being a Fulbright Fellow and Guggenheim Fellow.

Research Interests