Four lessons from Zaliznyak

Abstract

The article refers to four most important features of Academician Andrei Zaliznyaks (1935-2017) scholarly heritage, which include: 1) a clear statement of the activity goal and the understanding of its place in the scientific cognition of the world; 2) a logical sequence of work stages and their clear understanding; 3) comprehension of all the other obvious consequences arising from the work done.Within the framework of those requirements, the author of the article is trying, in particular, to evaluate such public initiatives relating to the Russian language as the total dictation and the word of the year. The paper discusses the degree to which modern research of the Russian language is compliant with those requirements, and emphasizes the inconsistency of the prevailing aspectological concepts, as well as the variety of rules dealing with the composition of semantic components in a wordform, sentence, or uttering. The author is skeptical about the prospects of the research of modern Russian word formation prioritising the inventory of word-formation types which cannot act as basic units for any kind of speech activity. The critical reflection on the notion of postfix allows the author to conclude that units regarded in terms of their semantic characteristics and not their position in a word form are clearly distributed among suffixes and endings (according to A.A. Zaliznyak). He also emphasises the complete incoherence of tasks set during the morphological analysis at school. In conclusion, the author writes about the reduction of moral standards within the professional community and recalls the fourth lesson of A.A. Zaliznyak - not to hope that colleagues will quickly recognise the research results.