Ronald I Kim
Hello there! I'm an Associate Professor of Linguistics in the Faculty of English at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, and from 2013 to 2019 was also Research Assistant in the Institute of Comparative Linguistics at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. I was born and raised in New Jersey, USA, where I graduated from high school in 1992 and from Princeton University in 1996. That year I moved to Philadelphia, where I received a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2002. After a one-year postdoctorate at Cornell, I returned to Philadelphia and taught at Penn, Temple, and Swarthmore, before moving to Poland in 2007.
My research interests include
• Historical linguistics of Indo-European (especially Tocharian, Armenian, Iranian, Greek, Balto-Slavic, and Germanic) and Semitic (especially Aramaic);
• Sociolinguistics and language variation; language contact; dialect geography; regional and ethnic varieties of North American English;
• Phonology (especially autosegmental, nonlinear, and prosodic) and morphology;
• Pidgin and creole linguistics (esp. contact languages of the Pacific); and
• Languages of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia.
In addition, I'm also an obsessive reader of history and politics, love studying languages, and enjoy travel, sports, good food and drink, watching music videos, and spending time with family.
Address: Department of Older Germanic Languages
Faculty of English
Adam Mickiewicz University
ul. Grunwaldzka 6
60-780 Poznań, Poland
My research interests include
• Historical linguistics of Indo-European (especially Tocharian, Armenian, Iranian, Greek, Balto-Slavic, and Germanic) and Semitic (especially Aramaic);
• Sociolinguistics and language variation; language contact; dialect geography; regional and ethnic varieties of North American English;
• Phonology (especially autosegmental, nonlinear, and prosodic) and morphology;
• Pidgin and creole linguistics (esp. contact languages of the Pacific); and
• Languages of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia.
In addition, I'm also an obsessive reader of history and politics, love studying languages, and enjoy travel, sports, good food and drink, watching music videos, and spending time with family.
Address: Department of Older Germanic Languages
Faculty of English
Adam Mickiewicz University
ul. Grunwaldzka 6
60-780 Poznań, Poland
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Books by Ronald I Kim
The present volume aims to supplement the synchronic approach to suppletion with a diachronic perspective. It treats problems in the analysis, reconstruction, and evolution of suppletive morphology in a range of ancient and modern Indo-European and Afroasiatic languages. Some contributions are more traditional in orientation, e.g. arguing for the crucial importance of etymology in the diachronic study of suppletion, while others grapple with contemporary debates on the nature of “strong” vs. “weak” or inflectional vs. derivational vs. stem suppletion, and still others raise questions of phonology, syntax, semantics, and language contact. Several contributions deal with the synchrony and diachrony of suppletion in individual ancient and modern Indo-European languages, often with interesting implications for Indo-European and for linguistic typology in general. Topics include: the formation of perfect passive participles in Latin; the double-copula systems of Celtic, Romance, and Basque; the prehistory of heteroclitic nominal stems in Proto-Indo-European; suppletion in Afroasiatic, older Indo-Iranian, Tocharian, Romance, and the Modern East Iranian language Yaghnōbī; the Gothic synthetic and periphrastic passives in competition; and minimal word constraints and suppletive imperatives in Arabic.
The book will be of interest to all those working on Indo-European or Afroasiatic languages, as well as scholars of language change in general, linguistic typology, morphological theory, and language acquisition.
Das Tocharische, ein erst im letzten Jahrhundert entdeckter Hauptsprachzweig der indogermanischen Sprachfamilie, dessen Sprecher am Rande der Seidenstraße im zentralasiatischen Tarim-Becken lebten und der Ende des 1. Jahrtausends n. Chr. ausstarb, gewinnt in den letzten Jahrzehnten in der historisch-vergleichenden indogermanischen Sprachwissenschaft zunehmend an Bedeutung. Der rasante Fortschritt in der sprachhistorischen Erschließung des Tocharischen hat in vielen Fällen zu einer Revision von Entwicklung und Rekonstruktion der indogermanischen Grammatik geführt. Viele Studien aus jüngerer Zeit haben eine Anzahl wahrscheinlicher Archaismen in Lexikon, Morphologie und Syntax aufgedeckt, die mitunter noch einen Zustand konservieren, der älter ist als der, der vom Griechischen und Indoiranischen reflektiert wird. Der vorliegende Band vereint eine Serie von Vorträgen, die anlässlich der Ringvorlesung „Indogermanische Sprachen und Kulturen an der Seidenstraße“ im Sommersemester 2009 an der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München von führenden Vertretern des Faches gehalten wurden und der Frage sprachlicher Archaismen und Innovationen des tocharischen Sprachzweiges gewidmet sind. In ihren Ergebnissen demonstrieren die Beiträge die Brisanz und wachsende Bedeutung des tocharischen Sprachzweigs für die Indogermanistik. Sie behandeln viele thematische Brennpunkte der indogermanistischen Diskussion vergangener Jahrzehnte wie z. B. die Entwicklung der nominalen Genera des Indogermanischen, die Entwicklung des indogermanischen Verbalsystems und der Kasusfunktionen.
Papers by Ronald I Kim
This paper examines the evidence of Crimean Gothic, Vandalic, and Burgundian and argues that none of the features traditionally regarded as diagnostic of East Germanic constitutes support for a subgroup in the phylogenetic sense. The only innovation of Bible Gothic common to all of these languages is the nonlow reflex of PGmc *ē, which may rather be an archaism; in addition, Crimean Gothic shares fortition of PGmc *jj and pronominal n.nom/acc.sg -ata. Raising of long mid vowels, monophthongization of PGmc *ai and *au, and weakening of unstressed vowels may reflect diffusion or parallel innovation. It follows that East Germanic should be viewed not as a subgroup, but as a peripheral set of varieties that lost contact early on with the rest of Germanic; this conclusion accords with the historical and archeological record.
It emerges that COS in Armenian is practically restricted to compounds
of anjn and azn ‘nation, people’, raising the possibility that semantic factors and/or lexical analogy have played a role. After examining the
prehistory of n-stem inflection in Armenian, it is proposed that these compounds have secondarily acquired plurals in -own- by lexical
diffusion from other nouns denoting individuals, the core of which goes back to derivatives in *-ōn- < PIE *-o-(H)on- with the substantivizing or individualizing suffix *-(o)n- and/or the possessive suffix *-H(o)n-. It follows that the Greek pattern should not be automatically reconstructed for the protolanguage.
The present volume aims to supplement the synchronic approach to suppletion with a diachronic perspective. It treats problems in the analysis, reconstruction, and evolution of suppletive morphology in a range of ancient and modern Indo-European and Afroasiatic languages. Some contributions are more traditional in orientation, e.g. arguing for the crucial importance of etymology in the diachronic study of suppletion, while others grapple with contemporary debates on the nature of “strong” vs. “weak” or inflectional vs. derivational vs. stem suppletion, and still others raise questions of phonology, syntax, semantics, and language contact. Several contributions deal with the synchrony and diachrony of suppletion in individual ancient and modern Indo-European languages, often with interesting implications for Indo-European and for linguistic typology in general. Topics include: the formation of perfect passive participles in Latin; the double-copula systems of Celtic, Romance, and Basque; the prehistory of heteroclitic nominal stems in Proto-Indo-European; suppletion in Afroasiatic, older Indo-Iranian, Tocharian, Romance, and the Modern East Iranian language Yaghnōbī; the Gothic synthetic and periphrastic passives in competition; and minimal word constraints and suppletive imperatives in Arabic.
The book will be of interest to all those working on Indo-European or Afroasiatic languages, as well as scholars of language change in general, linguistic typology, morphological theory, and language acquisition.
Das Tocharische, ein erst im letzten Jahrhundert entdeckter Hauptsprachzweig der indogermanischen Sprachfamilie, dessen Sprecher am Rande der Seidenstraße im zentralasiatischen Tarim-Becken lebten und der Ende des 1. Jahrtausends n. Chr. ausstarb, gewinnt in den letzten Jahrzehnten in der historisch-vergleichenden indogermanischen Sprachwissenschaft zunehmend an Bedeutung. Der rasante Fortschritt in der sprachhistorischen Erschließung des Tocharischen hat in vielen Fällen zu einer Revision von Entwicklung und Rekonstruktion der indogermanischen Grammatik geführt. Viele Studien aus jüngerer Zeit haben eine Anzahl wahrscheinlicher Archaismen in Lexikon, Morphologie und Syntax aufgedeckt, die mitunter noch einen Zustand konservieren, der älter ist als der, der vom Griechischen und Indoiranischen reflektiert wird. Der vorliegende Band vereint eine Serie von Vorträgen, die anlässlich der Ringvorlesung „Indogermanische Sprachen und Kulturen an der Seidenstraße“ im Sommersemester 2009 an der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München von führenden Vertretern des Faches gehalten wurden und der Frage sprachlicher Archaismen und Innovationen des tocharischen Sprachzweiges gewidmet sind. In ihren Ergebnissen demonstrieren die Beiträge die Brisanz und wachsende Bedeutung des tocharischen Sprachzweigs für die Indogermanistik. Sie behandeln viele thematische Brennpunkte der indogermanistischen Diskussion vergangener Jahrzehnte wie z. B. die Entwicklung der nominalen Genera des Indogermanischen, die Entwicklung des indogermanischen Verbalsystems und der Kasusfunktionen.
This paper examines the evidence of Crimean Gothic, Vandalic, and Burgundian and argues that none of the features traditionally regarded as diagnostic of East Germanic constitutes support for a subgroup in the phylogenetic sense. The only innovation of Bible Gothic common to all of these languages is the nonlow reflex of PGmc *ē, which may rather be an archaism; in addition, Crimean Gothic shares fortition of PGmc *jj and pronominal n.nom/acc.sg -ata. Raising of long mid vowels, monophthongization of PGmc *ai and *au, and weakening of unstressed vowels may reflect diffusion or parallel innovation. It follows that East Germanic should be viewed not as a subgroup, but as a peripheral set of varieties that lost contact early on with the rest of Germanic; this conclusion accords with the historical and archeological record.
It emerges that COS in Armenian is practically restricted to compounds
of anjn and azn ‘nation, people’, raising the possibility that semantic factors and/or lexical analogy have played a role. After examining the
prehistory of n-stem inflection in Armenian, it is proposed that these compounds have secondarily acquired plurals in -own- by lexical
diffusion from other nouns denoting individuals, the core of which goes back to derivatives in *-ōn- < PIE *-o-(H)on- with the substantivizing or individualizing suffix *-(o)n- and/or the possessive suffix *-H(o)n-. It follows that the Greek pattern should not be automatically reconstructed for the protolanguage.
It is argued that the weak aorist suffix goes back to *-ā-, in origin a (post-)PIE optative in *-e-h2-, and is cognate with Balto-Slavic preterite *-ā- and Italic imperfect *-ā-. The productive denominative and factitive presents in PIE *-eye/o- thus formed an aorist in *-eyā-. Contrary to received opinion, unlike vowels which came into contact following the loss of intervocalic *y did not contract, so the sequence *-eyā- yielded the diphthong *e‿a and spread to the aorists of almost all presents in -em, leaving only a small relic group in -acʻ-. The *-ch- of the weak aorist marker continues PIE *-sḱe/o- and was generalized from iterative-intensive imperfects to all imperfect-aorists, before the creation of the new imperfect in -i/y-. These hypotheses are integrated into a unified model of the evolution of the Classical Armenian verb that also accounts for the relic type of berem ‘carry’, aor. beri and the distribution of strong and weak aorists to nasal presents, e.g. erduay ‘feared’ (pres. erdnum) vs. lcʻi ‘filled’ (pres. lnum).
Keywords: suppletion, morphology, inflection, regularity, sound change, analogy, Indo-European
The event will focus on "The Eastern branch of the Iranian Languages" through a debate between two top experts in the field. Invited speakers are:
Prof. Maria Carmela Benvenuto (Università di Roma La Sapienza) - L’umlaut in Battriano e l’etimologia dell’antroponimo Σανδο
Prof. Ronald Kim (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań) - The Ossetic transitive preterite: origins and implications
On Friday 15th October 4 PM CEST
The event will be held online, on Zoom : https://unitn.zoom.us/j/86707192738
To receive the PASSCODE and the conference’s handouts please write to andrea.santamaria3@unibo.it or eleonora.selvi@student.unisi.it.
Know more about the Circolo Linguistico Fiorentino and its long history (since 1945) at https://www.letterefilosofia.unifi.it/vp-188-circolo-linguistico-fiorentino.html