A Word about Scientist and Teacher: On the 95th Birthday of Professor Leonid Mikhailovich Vasiliev

Abstract

The article is devoted to the founder of the Ufa Semantic School (Russia), Professor L.M. Vasiliev and his Systemic Semantic Dictionary of the Russian Language, which has no match among other modern lexicography works.

L.M. Vasiliev worked on the following problems: the essence of a linguistic sign, semiotic stratification of language, linguistic meaning and semantic fields, methods of language acquisition.

The Systemic Semantic Dictionary of the Russian Language contains 15 classes of predicate vocabulary selected and structured by the author: existential, evaluative, quantitative, mental, modal, spatial, emotional, predicates of relationships, states, properties, lifestyle, sound, movement, speech, perception, volitional efforts. Each class consists of macro- and micro-paradigms, including basic predicates, semantic derivatives, and forms of ways of verbal action and subjective evaluation, semantic correlates, as well as offer models.

To give an example, the article presents the semantic micro-paradigm “predicates of aesthetic evaluation” (262 units), their position in the lexical system of the Russian language being shown by the scheme: the semantic class “evaluative predicates” → three macro-paradigms “modal-evaluative,” “general-evaluative” and “partial-evaluative predicates” → three micro-paradigms “utilitarian”, “ethical and aesthetic evaluation predicates”.

The dictionary shows the system of semantic classes of the Russian language, describes their structure, content, and methods of lexical and grammatical explication.

The theory and methodology of constructing a dictionary can be extrapolated to the description of lexico-semantic systems in other languages.