Sebastian Shaumyan
| Sebastian Konstantinovich Shaumyan | |
|---|---|
Sebastian Shaumyan
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| Born |
February 27, 1916 Tbilisi, Russian Empire (present-day Georgia) |
| Died | January 21, 2007 (aged 90) New Haven, Connecticut, United States |
| School | Structural Linguistics, Semiotics |
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Main interests
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Theoretical Linguistics, semiotics, philosophy of Science |
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Influences
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Sebastian Konstantinovich Shaumyan (Armenian: Սեբաստյան Շահումյան, February 27, 1916 – January 21, 2007) was an Armenian American of linguistics and an outspoken adherent of structuralist analysis.
He was born in Tbilisi, the polyglot capital of the Russian Empire's territories in the Transcaucasus, on February 14, 1916, (although the shift to the Gregorian calendar a couple of years later made his birthday February 27). A sickly child, he was mostly tutored at home until he took a course in chemistry at a vocational school.
Having learnt German and English in addition to his Armenian, Georgian and Russian, Shaumyan took his degree in philology at Tbilisi State University. At some time in the late 1930s he came across Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (1916) and, captivated, knew his academic course was set.
World War II 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 (GRU), where he was permitted to pursue his studies. He was a Party member and, with a post at Moscow State University, 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 and Nikolai Trubetzkoy, both of whom were out of favour (one an émigré, the other a prince). He also defended the "formalist", Noam Chomsky, (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.
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