Alexander Shakhnarovich: A Genuine Scholar and a Wonderful Person

Abstract

This article dwells on a number of episodes related to the last years of Alexander Shakhnarovich, an outstanding Russian psycholinguist and a talented academic advisor. Alexander Shakhnarovich is known primarily for his research in child speech. The periodisation of speech development in early childhood he worked out is of particular interest. The article pinpoints that Shakhnarovich’s research was not related solely to speech development in ontogenesis, but elucidated a broader range of issues from those of general theory, like the structure of language consciousness, to those of special purposes, like linguistic expertise in forensics, dialectology, intonation and modality, peculiarities of text analysis, etc. It was Shakhnarovich’s great experience in analysing child speech that helped him to explore other psycholinguistic trends. The scientist proved to be an expert both in psycholinguistic issues that were intertwined with pure linguistics and in the psychology of speech. Alexander Shakhnarovich was a remarkable proponent of Lev Vygotsky’s scientific school whose theoretical insights made in the first half of the 20th century underlay Shakhnarovich’s findings. It is noteworthy that both Shakhnarovich and Vygotsky probed into child speech attempting to make conclusions on language capacity development as a whole and to tap into the fundamental through the applied.