XII Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2020

Igor Melchuk is a Soviet and Canadian linguist, the originator of the linguistic model ‘Meaning-text theory’, one of the founders of the Russian mathematical linguistics and the Moscow semantic school. He is also the developer (together with Olga Kulagina) of the first French-Russian machine translation system in the USSR.

In 1976, Melchuk was fired from the Institute of Linguistics for writing to the New York Times in support of Andrei Sakharov and Sergei Kovalev. Then he emigrated to Canada. Before retiring in 2009 he was a Professor at the Université de Montréal.

Igor Melchuk graduated from the Moscow State University's Philological department. January 14, 1954, Americans conducted the first experiment on machine translation: 300 phrases from Russian to English. Professor of Mathematics Alexey Lyapunov knew about it, after it he had rather significant meeting with Melchuk to discuss that important issue. A year and a half later, Igor Melchuk and Olga Kulagina managed to launch the first working algorithm of French-Russian translation in the Soviet Union and received the first prize at the competition of student works.

In 1956, with the assistance of academician A. I. Berg, Melchuk joined the Department of structural and applied Linguistics of the Institute of Linguistics of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Igor also defended his PhD thesis called ‘Automatic text analysis and some related issues of General Linguistics’. Since then, he has become a recognized specialist in machine translation.

‘Meaning-text theory was created by I. A. Melchuk in the mid-1960s in Moscow with the active participation of a number of other Moscow linguists primarily A. K. Zholkovsky, and Y. D. Apresyan.

Meaning-text theory (MTT) is a theoretical linguistic framework for the construction of models of natural language. The theory provides a large and elaborate basis for linguistic description and, due to its formal character, lends itself particularly well to computer applications, including machine translation, phraseology, and lexicography.

Linguistic models in MTT operate on the principle that language consists in a mapping from the content or meaning (semantics) of an utterance to its form or text (phonetics). Intermediate between these poles are additional levels of representation at the syntactic and morphological levels.

A crucial aspect of MTT is the lexicon, considered to be a comprehensive catalogue of the lexical units (LUs) of a language, these units being the lexemes, collocations and other phrasemes, constructions, and other configurations of linguistic elements that are learned and implemented in speech by users of language. The lexicon in MTT is represented by an explanatory combinatorial dictionary (ECD) which includes entries for all of the LUs of a language along with information speakers must know regarding their syntactics (the LU-specific rules and conditions on their combinatorics). An ECD for Russian was produced by Melchuk et al. (1984), and ECDs for French were published as Melchuk et al. (1999) and Melchuk & Polguère (2007).

In 1977 Melchuk left the Soviet Union. Then the Université de Montréal hired him. For the first six months, he was a visiting professor, it meant that he was paid as a full Professor, but had no rights. Six months later, Melchuk became a full Professor.

Igor Melchuk is a member of the Société de Linguistique de Paris(1974), the Linguistic Society of America(1979) and the Societas Linguistica Europaea(1983), the Royal Society of Canada (1994).

In 2012, a collection of his articles dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the scientist was published. In 2018, Melchuk and his former graduate student Yasmina Milicevic completed a textbook called ‘Advanced Introduction to Modern Semantics’.

Список использованной литературы

Бурас М. Я же не могу спокойно сидеть. Arzamas, 2019

Мельчук И.А. Опыт теории лингвистических моделей «Смысл ⇔ Текст». М., 1974

Мельчук И.А. Русский язык в модели «Смысл ⇔ Текст». Москва-Вена, 1995.

Мельчук И. А, Жолковский А. К., Апресян Ю. Д. и др. Толково-комбинаторный словарь современного русского языка: Опыты семантико-синтаксического описания русской лексики. Wien: Wiener Slavistischer Almanach, 1984.