Andrey Anatolyevich Zaliznyak

Andrey Anatolyevich Zaliznyak was a Soviet and Russian linguist, Doctor of Philology, professor, and full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. His research covered general and comparative-historical linguistics, Russian and Slavic linguistics, morphology, accentology, dialectology, and the history of Russian. In his work on Russian nominal inflection he developed a rigorous formal model of morphology; his Grammatical Dictionary of the Russian Language became one of the foundations for computational models of Russian morphology. Zaliznyak laid the foundations for the systematic study of the Old Novgorod dialect and for many years investigated the language of Novgorod birch-bark documents. His work on historical accentology and Old Russian texts provided rigorous linguistic evidence for the authenticity of The Tale of Igor's Campaign. He became a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1987 and a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1997; he was also a member of the Linguistic Society of Paris from 1957, the Linguistic Society of America from 1985, and a corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences. He was widely known as a science educator and popularizer of linguistics, notably for public lectures on newly discovered birch-bark documents and for criticism of amateur linguistics.