Vladimir Mikhaylovich Alpatov (russian: Влади́мир Миха́йлович Алпа́тов; born April 17, 1945) is a Soviet and Russian

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

, Doctor of Philology (1983), a Corresponding Member of the

Russian Academy of Sciences The Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS; russian: Росси́йская акаде́мия нау́к (РАН) ''Rossíyskaya akadémiya naúk'') consists of the national academy of Russia; a network of scientific research institutes from across t ...

(2008). He is an author of more than 200 works in

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

and a specialist in

Japanese studies Japanese studies (Japanese: ) or Japan studies (sometimes Japanology in Europe), is a sub-field of area studies or East Asian studies involved in social sciences and humanities research on Japan. It incorporates fields such as the study of Japanese ...

and the

history of linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language, involving analysis of language form, language meaning, and language in context. Language use was first systematically documented in Mesopotamia, with extant lexical lists of the 3rd to the 2nd M ...

Life

Vladimir Alpatov was born in the family of a historian and writer

Mikhail Alpatov Mikhail Vladimirovich Alpatov (russian: Михаил Владимирович Алпатов; 10 December 1902 – 9 May 1986) was a Soviet historian and art theorist, notable for his contribution to the history of the culture of ancient Rus. Bi ...

and a historian and byzantinist Zinaida Udaltsova. He graduated from the Department of theoretical and applied linguistics of the Philological faculty of the

Moscow State University M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU; russian: Московский государственный университет имени М. В. Ломоносова) is a public research university in Moscow, Russia and the most prestigious ...

in 1968. In 1971 he obtained his Candidate Degree (''The grammatical system of politeness forms in modern standard Japanese'') at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In 1972, he started working at this institute. In 1983 he obtained his Doctoral Degree (''Problems of morpheme and word in modern Japanese''). For almost 20 years, he was a deputy director of the Institute of Oriental Studies. Since 1993, he has been teaching a course on the

at the

as well as at the

Russian State University for the Humanities The Russian State University for the Humanities (RSUH, RGGU; russian: Росси́йский госуда́рственный гуманита́рный университе́т, РГГУ, translit=Rossijskij gosudarstvennyj gumanitarnyj universit ...

. He is also an author of a university textbook on the history of linguistics (1st ed., 1998). In 2008 he was elected a Corresponding Member of the

. In 2012, Vladimir Alpatov was elected the director of the

Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences The Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences (russian: Институт языкознания Российской академии наук) is a structural unit in the Language and Literature Section of History and Philology ...

for five years. In 2017, he was succeeded by

Andrej Kibrik Andrej Kibrik (russian: Андре́й Алекса́ндрович Ки́брик; born June 18, 1963) is a Russian linguist, the director of the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences (since 2017), and professor at the Phil ...

Research

Vladimir Alpatov is a specialist in oriental languages (first of all,

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

), he is one of the authors of a collective 2-volume ''Theoretical grammar of Japanese'' (2008). In his Candidate and Doctoral dissertations, Japanese data were used for tackling more general theoretical questions on the notions of word and

morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology. In English, morphemes are ...

grammatical category In linguistics, a grammatical category or grammatical feature is a property of items within the grammar of a language. Within each category there are two or more possible values (sometimes called grammemes), which are normally mutually exclusive ...

agglutination In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative lang ...

and some other problematic issues in general

morphology Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to: Disciplines * Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts * Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies ...

and theory of grammar. Among the main research interests of Vladimir Alpatov is the

. He is one of the leading Russian specialists in this field. He is the author of a comprehensive manual on the history of linguistic studies, which briefly describes the development of these studies from the ancient times to the middle of the twentieth century. Equally important are his studies on linguistics in the USSR: he is the author of monographs about

Mikhail Bakhtin Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin ( ; rus, Михаи́л Миха́йлович Бахти́н, , mʲɪxɐˈil mʲɪˈxajləvʲɪdʑ bɐxˈtʲin; – 7 March 1975) was a Russian philosopher, literary critic and scholar who worked on literary theor ...

and

Valentin Voloshinov Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov (russian: Валенти́н Никола́евич Воло́шинов; June 18, 1895, St. Petersburg – June 13, 1936, Leningrad) was a Russian Soviet linguist, whose work has been influential in the field of ...

, about the fate of many Slavic and Turkic scholars during the period of

Great Purge The Great Purge or the Great Terror (russian: Большой террор), also known as the Year of '37 (russian: 37-й год, translit=Tridtsat sedmoi god, label=none) and the Yezhovshchina ('period of Nikolay Yezhov, Yezhov'), was General ...

, about the controversial personality of

Nicholas Marr Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr (, ''Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr''; , ''Nikoloz Iak'obis dze Mari''; — 20 December 1934) was a Georgian-born historian and linguist who gained a reputation as a scholar of the Caucasus during the 1910s before embarking o ...

and the fate of his

Japhetic theory In linguistics, the Japhetic theory of Soviet Union, Soviet linguist Nicholas Marr, Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr (1864–1934) postulated that the Kartvelian languages of the Caucasus area are related to the Semitic languages of the Middle East. ...

. Among Alpatov's other works are studies on Japanese

sociolinguistics Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural Norm (sociology), norms, expectations, and context (language use), context, on the way language is used, and society's effect on languag ...

as well as on the

language policy Language policy is an interdisciplinary academic field. Some scholars such as Joshua Fishman and Ofelia García consider it as part of sociolinguistics. On the other hand, other scholars such as Bernard SpolskyRobert B. Kaplanand Joseph Lo Bianco ...

in the

USSR The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...

Major works (books)

* ''Категории вежливости в современном японском языке'' (1973, 2006, 2009, 2011) * ''Структура грамматических единиц в современном японском языке'' (1979) * ''Япония: язык и общество'' (1988, 2003) * ''Изучение японского языка в России и СССР'' (1988) * ''История одного мифа. Марр и марризм'' (1991, 2004) * ''Дело славистов: 30-е годы'' (1994), with Fedor Ashnin * ''Николай-Николас Поппе'' (1996) * ''150 языков и политика: 1917—2000'' (2000) * ''История лингвистических учений. Учебное пособие'' (1998, 1999, 2001, 2005) * ''Грамматика японского языка: Введение. Фонология. Супрафонология. Морфонология'' (2000), with Igor Vardul and Sergej Starostin * ''Репрессированная тюркология'' (2002), with Fedor Ashnin and Dmitry Nasilov * ''Волошинов, Бахтин и лингвистика'' (2005) * ''Япония: язык и культура'' (2008) * ''Теоретическая грамматика японского языка: В 2-х кн.'' (2008), with Peter Arkadiev and Vera Podlesskaya * ''Языковеды, востоковеды, историки'' (2012) * ''Языкознание. От Аристотеля до компьютерной лингвистики'' (2018) * ''Слово и части речи'' (2018)

External links

Vladimir Alpatov
at the

website
Vladimir Alpatov
at the Institute of Linguistics website
Vladimir Alpatov
at the Institute of Oriental Studies website
Vladimir Alpatov
at the Department of theoretical and applied linguistics website {{DEFAULTSORT:Alpatov, Vladimir Mikhaylovich 1945 births Living people Linguists from Russia Linguists from the Soviet Union 20th-century linguists 21st-century linguists Corresponding Members of the Russian Academy of Sciences Soviet orientalists Russian orientalists Morphologists