Shaumyan, Sebastian Konstantinovich

Sebastian Konstantinovich Shaumyan was born on February 27 (February 14 according to the old style) of 1916 in Tiflis (modern Tbilisi), which brought together many different cultures and languages, on the eve of the revolution he survived, in the year of the posthumous publication of the Course of General Linguistics Ferdinand de Saussure. As a child, he was sick a lot and was forced to spend a lot of time with tutors. When choosing his professional path, Sebastian Konstantinovich initially had doubts: he attended a chemistry course in a technical school, and then studied German and English in addition to the Armenian, Georgian and Russian, which he already owned. Revelation came to him when he became acquainted with the book of Saussure. He began to study philology at the University of Tbilisi, where he received a diploma of graduation. The Second World War interrupted his academic studies: he participated in the battles for Kerch, which was twice occupied by the Nazis, after which he submitted a request to send him to the front line of the front, but instead he was sent to serve in the Main Intelligence Directorate in Moscow (GRU ) At the GRU, he directed the processing of foreign radio broadcasts.

After the war, in Moscow, Shaumyan gradually, but very persistently, showed his passionate interest in linguistics. In 1950, he participated in phonological debates, courageously or recklessly, defending the work of the disgraced Nikolai Trubetskoy and Roman Jacobson (the central figures of the Prague Linguistic Circle), for which his opponents reproached him with “idealism” and “formalism”. Shaumyan’s colleagues used to say that they were closely following the work of Sebastian Konstantinovich not so much out of interest in phonology, but then to find out if he was sitting.

Influenced by the work of Noam Chomsky , whom he also had to defend against accusations of formalism, Shaumyan was working on the creation of the so-called applicative generative model of the language, and finally received a doctorate in 1962. In the early 1960s, he helped organize the Department of Structural and Applied Linguistics at Moscow State University. Then Shaumyan forms and heads the structural linguistics sector at the Institute of Russian Language of the USSR Academy of Sciences. A series of books appears, many of which were co-written with his Moscow colleague Polina Arkadyevna Soboleva: Applicative generative model and calculus of transformations in Russian (1963), Structural linguistics (1965), Fundamentals of generative grammar of the Russian language: introduction to genotypic structures (1968) , Philosophical Issues of Theoretical Linguistics (1971), Applicative Grammar as a Semantic Theory of Natural Language (1974). All these works have been translated into English and other languages.

As an active member of the party (as he said, he "was good at quoting Marx"), Shaumyan used his party post to help and protect those who needed protection and help. His party status, as well as worldwide fame in his field of knowledge gave him the opportunity to travel abroad, he visited Poland, Germany and America, spent a year at the University of Edinburgh in 1968.

In 1975, at the age of 60, anticipating forced retirement due to friction with the academic authorities, and in search of adventure, Shaumyan, taking advantage of the possibility of emigration allowed at that time, moved to the United States, where he was invited on the recommendation of Roman Jacobson, who worked at that time at Harvard University as a professor at Yale University in the Department of Linguistics, which was then headed by Edward Stankevich . During these years, two more books were published in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Declay and Zlatka Gencheva.

To his chagrin, in 1986, Sebastian Konstantinovich due to age was supposed to leave the position of acting professor, but he remained a distinguished professor at Yale University, and already worked very actively in that capacity. In 1987, his book Semiotic Language Theory was published by Indiana University Press, he worked on an engineering semiotics project with a company in New York, and regularly spoke at conferences. In 1997, he received a grant from the Fulbright Foundation and came to Moscow for 10 months to do research. In Moscow he was greeted very warmly and enthusiastically. Then in 2005, at the age of 89, he again came to Moscow, receiving another Fulbright grant. In 2006, his last book, Signs, Mind, and Reality, was published (published by John Benjamins, in the Successes in Consciousness Studies series), with an intriguing subtitle, “The Theory of Language as a Folk Model of the World.”

Shaumyan's later works are marked by a wide interest in the philosophy of science and the fundamental problems of linguistics. They contain sharp criticism of Noam Chomsky for his inability to properly delimit what actually belongs to the field of linguistic research. The list of languages ​​considered in the last book of Shaumyan testifies to the breadth and lively nature of his interests; this includes the Basque language, the endangered Australian Dirbal, the language of the Oregon Takelma Indians. The fact that Shaumyan again with inspiration turns to the ideas of Saussure and again very skillfully introduces the “dialectical” method into linguistics, gives his work a very significant power of conviction, and not only among those who are skeptical of Chomsky. Although some of his ideas, at first glance, may seem old-fashioned and even Hegelian, he very skillfully and convincingly fights off every objection, using the modern language of scientific debate. His gentle manner hides his iron resolve, and he is gaining ardent supporters: from academic scholars such as Adam Mackay, author of Search for the Lost Semiotic Revolution in Modern Linguistics, to Devin Chamonix, a former missionary from Papua New Guinea who ended up in the shipwreck in Hawaii, where he was so inspired by the controversy of the three continents that Shaumyan waged with two colleagues on the Internet that he devoted himself to the project, which he called Panlingwa.

Sebastian Konstantinovich Shaumyan quietly passed away on January 21, 2007 in his home in New Haven, Connecticut, USA, sitting in a chair in the kitchen at home and peacefully immersed in reading the Decameron in Russian. Sebastian Shaumyan was survived by his 64-year-old wife, Maria, and their three children - a mathematician, computer scientist and philosopher-linguist, who seemed to share the genius of their father.

• Structural Linguistics (1965)
• Applicational Grammar as a Semiotic Theory of Natural Language (1975)
• A Semiotic Theory of Language (1987)
• Signs, Mind and Reality (2006)

• Abstraction in modern linguistics