Sebastian Konstantinovich Shaumyan (February 27, 1916 - January 21, 2007) was a Soviet

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

-Armenian

Armenians

Armenian people or Armenians are a nation and ethnic group native to the Armenian Highland.The largest concentration is in Armenia having a nearly-homogeneous population with 97.9% or 3,145,354 being ethnic Armenian....

 and American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 theoretician of linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 and an outspoken adherent of structuralist

Structural Linguistics

Structural linguistics is an approach to linguistics originating from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. De Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916, stressed examining language as a static system of interconnected units...

 analysis.

Biography

He was born in Tbilisi

Tbilisi

Tbilisi is the capital and the largest city of Georgia, lying on the banks of the Mt'k'vari River. The name is derived from an early Georgian form T'pilisi and it was officially known as Tiflis until 1936...

, the polyglot capital of Soviet Georgia, on February 14 (although the shift to the Gregorian calendar a couple of years later made his birthday February 27), 1916. A sickly child, he was mostly tutored at home until he took a course in chemistry at a vocational school.

Having learnt German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 and English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 in addition to his Armenian

Armenian language

The Armenian language is an Indo-European language spoken by the Armenian people. It is the official language of the Republic of Armenia as well as in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh. The language is also widely spoken by Armenian communities in the Armenian diaspora...

, Georgian

Georgian language

Georgian is the native language of the Georgians and the official language of Georgia, a country in the Caucasus.Georgian is the primary language of about 4 million people in Georgia itself, and of another 500,000 abroad...

 and Russian

Russian language

Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

, Shaumyan took his degree in philology at Tbilisi State University

Tbilisi State University

Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University , better known as Tbilisi State University , is a university established on 8 February 1918 in Tbilisi, Georgia. TSU is the oldest university in the whole Caucasus region...

. At some time in the late 1930s he came across Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...

's Course in General Linguistics (1916) and, captivated, knew his academic course was set.

World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

 briefly interrupted his scholarly aspirations, as he became embroiled in the battles for twice Nazi-occupied Kerch. He applied for a front-line posting, but instead he was sent to the Main Intelligence Unit in Moscow

Moscow

Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...

 (GRU), where he was permitted to pursue his studies. He was a Party member and, with a post at Moscow State University

Moscow State University

Lomonosov Moscow State University , previously known as Lomonosov University or MSU , is the largest university in Russia. Founded in 1755, it also claims to be one of the oldest university in Russia and to have the tallest educational building in the world. Its current rector is Viktor Sadovnichiy...

, used his position to help, and sometimes to shelter, those who might be accused of the various crimes of formalism or idealism.

Shaumyan published Structural Linguistics in 1965 and founded the Section of Structural Linguistics at the Institute of Russian Language in Moscow, where he co-wrote many works with Polina Arkadievana Soboleva. He promoted the work of Roman Jakobson

Roman Jakobson

Roman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian linguist and literary theorist.As a pioneer of the structural analysis of language, which became the dominant trend of twentieth-century linguistics, Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century...

 and Nikolai Trubetzkoy

Nikolai Trubetzkoy

Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy was a Russian linguist and historian whose teachings formed a nucleus of the Prague School of structural linguistics. He is widely considered to be the founder of morphophonology...

, both of whom were out of favour (one an émigré, the other a prince). He also defended the "formalist", Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...

, (whom later he vigorously assailed) in Fundamentals of the Generative Grammar of Russian (1958), and Applicational Generative Model and Transformational Calculus of Russian (1963), both written with Soboleva.

In 1968 Shaumyan spent a year in Edinburgh

Edinburgh

Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland, the second largest city in Scotland, and the eighth most populous in the United Kingdom. The City of Edinburgh Council governs one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas. The council area includes urban Edinburgh and a rural area...

 and in 1975 was able to join the wave of Jewish emigration permitted at that time, joining Yale’s faculty of linguistics.

As part of the procedure for granting tenure, the department solicited opinions about Professor Shaumyan’s strengths and his standing from a large number of academic linguists around the world. "Brilliant world-famous linguist deserves tenure," came an admirably unambiguous cable from Belgrade

Belgrade

Belgrade is the capital and largest city of Serbia. It is located at the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers, where the Pannonian Plain meets the Balkans. According to official results of Census 2011, the city has a population of 1,639,121. It is one of the 15 largest cities in Europe...

. Others called his work "the cornerstone of modern linguistics" and him "one of the supreme masters of his subject".

Generous praise came from the universities of Eastern Europe. For some Cold War

Cold War

The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...

 scorekeepers, "Russia's loss is America's gain". From MIT itself, the belly of the beast, there were generous words. Chomsky himself, from whose positions Shaumyan was to deviate ever further, writes that “there should be no question, as far as I can see, with regard to offering him a permanent appointment at the highest level".

Roman Jakobson

Roman Jakobson

Roman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian linguist and literary theorist.As a pioneer of the structural analysis of language, which became the dominant trend of twentieth-century linguistics, Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century...

 praised his "genuine enthusiasm for inspired research and inspiring teaching"; while for Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco Knight Grand Cross is an Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist, best known for his novel The Name of the Rose , an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory...

, Shaumyan’s model is the only alternative to Chomsky's. Shaumyan's paper Two Paradigms Of Linguistics: The
Semiotic Versus Non-Semiotic Paradigm is available online.

Shaumyan's theory of applicative grammar was developed, reinforced, and extended in Applicational Grammar as a Semiotic Theory of Natural Language, (1977); in A Semiotic Theory of Language (1987); and finally in Signs, Mind, and Reality (2006, in the series Advances in Consciousness Research), with the intriguing subtitle A Theory of Language As the Folk Model of the World.

To his chagrin, he was superannuated by Yale in 1986, but maintained, as Emeritus, a vigorous and very productive retirement. His bibliography contains a dozen books, some two hundred papers, and he was active on the conference circuit. In 2005, approaching 90, he returned to Moscow as a Fulbright scholar (but was refused a visa for a longer stay.)

Shaumyan’s later work is marked by a broad interest in the philosophy of science, in foundational questions of linguistics and in related but separate studies of consciousness theory, and neurolinguistics. It is sharply critical of Chomsky, who Shaumyan saw as being unable to properly delineate what pertains to the study of linguistics proper. The list of languages cited in his last book gives evidence of the breadth of his interests; they include Basque

Basque language

Basque is the ancestral language of the Basque people, who inhabit the Basque Country, a region spanning an area in northeastern Spain and southwestern France. It is spoken by 25.7% of Basques in all territories...

, the endangered Australian language of Dyirbal, and the extinct Oregon Indian Takelma

Takelma

The Takelma were a Native American people that lived in the Rogue Valley of interior southwest Oregon, with most of their villages sited along the Rogue River. The name Takelma means Along the River.-History:...

.

Shaumyan's revival of Saussure's ideas and his reintroduction of the "dialectic" method into linguistics were found persuasive by many linguists, not only by those sceptical of Chomskyan theory.

Applicative Universal Grammar (AUG)

The core of Shaumyan's linguistic theory is Applicative Universal Grammar

Applicative Universal Grammar

Applicative Universal Grammar, or AUG, is a universal semantic metalanguage intended for studying the semantic processes in particular languages....

 or AUG. The
theory was first introduced in his book Strukturnaja lingvistika (Structural Linguistics), published in Moscow in 1965. AUG

Applicative Universal Grammar

Applicative Universal Grammar, or AUG, is a universal semantic metalanguage intended for studying the semantic processes in particular languages....

 is based on combinatorial logic and grammatical categories which are built from two primitive universal types, called a term (T) and a sentence (S), which exist in every language. A term represents a noun or a noun phrase: for example "dog", "a dog", "a big dog" would all be considered terms. "A dog runs" would be a complete sentence. The verb "runs" is an operator that acts upon the operand term "a dog" and transforms it into
a complete sentence "a dog runs". In Shaumyan's operator notation the verb "runs" would be
represented symbolically as OTS. Recently, AUG has been used in computational linguistics in the development of a natural language parsing program, using the programming language Haskell

Haskell (programming language)

Haskell is a standardized, general-purpose purely functional programming language, with non-strict semantics and strong static typing. It is named after logician Haskell Curry. In Haskell, "a function is a first-class citizen" of the programming language. As a functional programming language, the...

. Natural language parsing has important applications in machine translation of sentences from one language into another.

In the paper entitled Using Types to Parse Natural Language (In Proceedings of Glasgow Functional Programming Workshop, IFIP, Springer Verlag, 1995), Mark P. Jones, Paul Hudak

Paul Hudak

Paul Hudak is a Professor of Computer Science at Yale University. He is a former Chair of the Department. He is known as one of the designers of the Haskell programming language. Currently he is also Master of Saybrook College at Yale.- External links :*...

 and Shaumyan give a brief introduction to AUG:

To understand the way that AUG works, it is useful to think of words
and phrases as atoms and expressions, respectively, in a typed language of
combinators. For our simplified version of AUG, there are just two primitive
types: T representing terms (for example, nouns such as "friend" and noun
phrases such as "my friend"), and S representing complete sentences (such as
"my friend runs"). The only non-primitive type is of the form Oxy, denoting
phrases that transform phrases of type x to modified phrases of type y; this is
the most important concept behind the AUG formalism.

For example, the word "my" is treated as having type OTT since it is applied
to a term of type T to obtain a modified term, also of type T (every word is
pre-assigned one or more types in this way). Thus the construction of the noun
phrase "my friend" can be described by an inference:




More generally, we can use the following rule to describe the application of one
phrase, p of type Oxy, to another, q of type x:




Clearly, types of the form Oxy correspond to function types, written as (x --> y)
in more conventional notation, while the typing rule above is the standard
method for typing the application of a function p to an argument value q.
The O for function types is used in the descriptions of AUG cited above, and
for the most part we will continue to use the same notation here to avoid any
confusion with type expressions in Haskell; in our program, the types of natural
language phrases are represented by data values, not by Haskell types. Another
advantage of the prefix O notation is that it avoids the need for parentheses and
allows a more compact notation for types.

The results of parsing a complete sentence can be described by a tree structure labelled
with the types of the words and phrases that are used in its construction. The following example is produced directly by the program described later from the input string "my friend lives in Boston".

The results of parsing a complete sentence can be described by a tree structure
labelled with the types of the words and phrases that are used in its
construction. The following example is produced directly by the program described later from the input string "my friend lives in Boston".




Notice that, to maintain the original word order, we have allowed both forward
and backward application of functions to arguments. The first of these was
described by the rule above, while the second is just:




For example, in the tree above, we have used this rule to apply the phrase
in Boston to the intransitive verb lives; the function acts as a modifier,
turning the action of "living" into the more specific action of "living in Boston".
It is sometimes useful to rearrange the trees produced by parsing a phrase
so that functions are always written to the left of the arguments to which they
are applied. This reveals the applicative structure of a particular phrase and
helps us to concentrate on underlying grammatical structure without being
distracted by concerns about word order -- which vary considerably from one
language to another. Rewriting the parse tree above in this way we obtain:




In situations where the types of subphrases are not required, we can use a
flattened, curried form of these trees, such as in Boston lives (my friend),
to describe the result of parsing a phrase. The two different ways of arranging
a parse tree shown here correspond to the concepts of phenotype and genotype
grammar, respectively, in AUG, but will not be discussed in any further detail
here.

One of the most important tasks in an application of AUG is to assign
suitable types to each word in some given lexicon or dictionary. The type T is an
obvious choice for simple nouns like "friend" and "Boston" in the example above.
Possessive pronouns like "my" can be treated in the same way as adjectives using
the type OTT. In a similar way, intransitive verbs, like "lives", can be described
by the type OTS transforming a subject term of type T into a sentence phrase
of type S. The word "in", with type OTOOTSOTS, in the example above deserves
special attention. Motivated by the diagram above, we can think of "in" as
a function that combines a place of type T (where?), an action of type OTS
(what?), and a subject of type T (who?) to obtain a sentence phrase of type S.