Yale Bulletin and Calendar

April 6, 2007|Volume 35, Number 24

Sebastian Konstantinovich Shaumyan

In Memoriam:
Sebastian Konstantinovich Shaumyan: Theoretical linguist

Sebastian Konstantinovich Shaumyan, professor emeritus of linguistics, died in London on Jan. 21 at the age of 90.

Shaumyan was born in 1916 in Tblisi, the Russian province of Georgia, where many Armenians had settled after escaping from the Turkish massacres of earlier generations. His father was a bookkeeper. His uncle, Stephen Shaumyan, joined with Lenin during the Revolution in World War I, and in 1918, became provincial governor of the Bolshevik government at Baku. Anti-revolutionary forces captured and executed him later that year.

Sebastian Shaumyan, more interested in scholarship than politics, attended Tbilisi University, where he studied philology. In 1941, with the outbreak of World War II, he left to join the Russian Army and served until 1953. He saw action in the Crimea during the Nazi invasion and later was assigned to an administrative office in Moscow with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He managed to combine the army with graduate study, writing his dissertation and receiving his doctorate in 1950.

After being discharged from the army in 1953, he spent the next 20 years teaching and doing research in linguistics at the Academy of Science and Moscow University. He espoused modern scientific methods in linguistics, the branch known as structural linguistics -- an approach initiated by Ferdinand de Saussure and developed by the Prague School.

His research in this area culminated in 1965 with the publication of "Structural Linguistics." In the same year he founded the Section of Structural Linguistics at the Institute of Russian Language, part of the Academy of Science in Moscow.

In 1975 Shaumyan joined the Yale Department of Linguistics, where he developed a linguistic approach called applicational grammar. He expanded this linguistic view in "Applicational Grammar as a Semiotic Theory of Natural Language" (1975) and in "A Semiotic Theory of Language" (1987). After his retirement from Yale in 1987, Shaumyan remained active in the field. His final book, "Signs, Mind and Reality," was published in 2006. His 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.

He is survived by his second wife, Maria, and their three children.

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In Memoriam: Sebastian Konstantinovich Shaumyan

Yale Books in Brief

Campus Notes