Andrej Zaliznjak. Cutting off the unnecessary [Андрей Анатольевич Зализняк. Абстрагироваться от лишнего]
Anton Zimmerling
July 2024 

This paper offers a polemic view on the heritage of Andrej A. Zaliznjak (1935—2017), who authored fundamental works on Russian and Old Russian. In different years, Zaliznjak addressed issues in morphology, syntax, accentology, and historical grammar. This apparent variety of his interests gives an impression that Zaliznjak moved from structural paradigmatic description to merely historical-philological analysis of specific texts. Zaliznjak’s basic method, however, remained unchanged. His descriptions were always rule-based. Zaliznjak’s rules can be identified with predictive models in the sense adopted in natural sciences. His models gave accurate results since Zaliznjak had a gift of cutting off all kinds of redundant information in his rule-based descriptions and kept the latter apart from other linguistic issues as well as from philological commentary. Although Zaliznjak himself avoided programmatic declarations, he can be called a consistent structuralist who successfully applied natural science criteria to linguistic evidence.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008271 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Slovo. ru: Baltic Accent. 2020. Vol. 11, № 2, 9-17. DOI: 10.5922/2225-5346-2020-2-1
keywords:	andrej zaliznjak, structuralism, grammar, predictive models, natural sciences, verification, morphology, syntax
Downloaded:	336 times

 

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