TWINNING PROGRAM WITH ESTONIA, LATVIA, AND LITHUANIA

Karl Pajusalu of Tartu University spent a month at Stanford in April 2000. During that time, he and Paul Kiparsky worked out a tentative analysis of the South Estonian vowel system and determined what additional material they would need to gather during Kiparsky's planned visit to the region later that year. While at Stanford, Pajusalu also attended several courses relevant to the joint project, including a seminar taught by his U.S. colleague.

Kiparsky spent three weeks visiting Tartu and other Estonian sites in August 2000. Accompanied by Pajusalu, he made a lengthy field trip to the Seto country to record dialect materials. It was very successful, in part thanks to Paul Hagu, a native speaker who accompanied them and helped greatly in locating informants and interpreting the data. The researchers also visited Latvia for a few days with Tiit-Rein Viitso in order to record material from three of the last surviving speakers of Livonian. In addition, Kiparsky had timed his stay in Tartu to coincide with the International Congress of Finno-Ugric Linguistics, which enabled him to meet a number of other specialists working on these languages. During his stay, he wrote a draft of a joint paper on Seto vowel harmony, which Pajusalu then revised. After another round of revisions it should be ready for publication.

Update on Activities in 2001

As their project on South Estonian vowel harmony moved into its second year, Paul Kiparsky and his Estonian partner Karl Pajusalu of the University of Tartu expanded their work into two related areas: a comparative analysis of the vowel harmony system of the entire Balto-Finnic language group and a detailed study of stress in the Seto dialect. They based their analysis on Optimality Theory, a relatively new approach based on the idea that phonological systems emerge from the interaction of ranked constraints. In order to gather more data, Kiparsky visited Estonia in August 2001. He and his colleague conducted interviews with native speakers, including three of the few remaining speakers of the nearly extinct Livonian language. Kiparsky also had intensive and fruitful discussions with other Estonian linguistics scholars, including Tiit-Rein Viitso and Paul Hagu. In October 2001, Pajusalu arrived for a second month-long visit at Stanford., during which he participated in classes and workshops and made use of the university library to update himself on recent developments in Optimality Theory. The two colleagues also made joint presentations on their findings at both Stanford and Berkeley. Making use of a no-cost extension through the end of 2002, Kiparsky plans another visit to Estonia in the fall. In the meantime, he and Pajusalu will focus on finishing at least four joint publications summarizing their research results. Kiparsky reports that, "working with Pajusalu opened up a very rich and so far virtually untouched field of research....This project was a wonderful opportunity and exciting experience for both of us."