Era Kuznetsova - Outstanding Linguist and Educator

10:34, March 9, 2022

The story of the founder of the Ural Semantic School

To reach the nucleus, the primary bases of the Russian language lexicon and with their help to reveal all the structure, complexity and beauty of the system of words and meanings - such was the goal of Era Kuznetsova, the founder of the Ural Semantic School. The initial capital of the school laid by Era Kuznetsova is the author's method of step-by-step identification of the lexical meaning of words, fundamental studies of verbs, and textbooks on lexicology.

Almost 35 years later, after the death of Era Kuznetsova, the Ural Semantic School is known not only in Russia, but also widely beyond its borders. The list of achievements of the school, which is now represented by 60 scientists, includes dozens of monographs, textbooks and study guides. The main result of the school's activity is more than 20 unique dictionaries, created according to its own methodology.

There was a queue for the text of her doctoral thesis

Era Vasilyevna Kuznetsova was born 95 years ago, on February 7, 1927 in the city of Polevskoi of Sverdlovsk Region, in the land of masters, praised in the stories of Bazhov. Era was an abbreviation composed by her father, a Red Army officer, a hero of the Civil War, who commanded a cavalry regiment and was awarded the Order of the Red Banner: E - era, r - revolutionary, a - apogee. In 1937 my father was arrested and soon died in the Vorkuta mines.

The country was still at war when in 1944, after graduating with honors from high school, Era entered the Philological Faculty of Moscow State University. She dreamed of entering the Philosophy Faculty, but as the daughter of an "enemy of the people" she was not allowed to. But such outstanding scientists as Academician and Dean of the Faculty Victor Vladimirovich Vinogradov and theorist and historian of Russian language Ruben Ivanovich Avanesov were her teachers. The famous lexicographer Sergey Ivanovich Ozhegov was the supervisor of Era Kuznetsova's thesis work.

Era Kuznetsova also graduated with honors and was recommended for graduate school, but for the same reason of unreliability, the candidacy of Kuznetsova and a couple more of her friends were rejected. Eventually, due to her persistence, Era Kuznetsova defended her PhD thesis in 1952.

For the next decade and a half she was head of the Russian Language Department at Pedagogical Institute Pacific National University, assistant and then senior lecturer at the Department of Russian Language and Stylistics of Ural Federal University and later at Donetsk National University. In the late 1960s Kuznetsova turned to structural linguistics, the study of the relations of lexical units, and the study of verb semantics itself.

In 1968 the Kuznetsov family returned to Sverdlovsk, Era Kuznetsova became an assistant professor at the Department of Russian Language, General Linguistics and Verbal Communication of the Ural State University (now UrFU) and developed her own method of isolating and describing lexical-semantic groups and semantic relationships of words: from individual words to general concepts and word groups. In 1974 she defended her doctoral dissertation at the Institute of Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. In the main, Lenin's library of the USSR, a queue is lined up for the text of her doctoral dissertation. In the same year, Era Kuznetsova organized and headed the Department of Modern Russian at Ural State University.

In Search of the Primal Basis of Language

As a scientist and Head of the Department of Modern Russian, Era Kuznetsova conducted extensive scientific research. The sphere of her interests were the main problems and tasks of Russian lexicology, the word as an element (subject) of grammatical and lexico-semantic research, grammatical classes of words, technologies of revealing system relations in the lexicon. At the end of the 1970s the practical result of our labor-intensive and long scientific work was a groundbreaking training dictionary of lexical and grammatical groups of Russian verbs. It was prepared under the guidance of Era Kuznetsov, and came out of print only after her death in 1988, causing a furore in the scientific world.

In 1980 the textbook "Russian Vocabulary as a System" is published, created at the peak of Era Kuznetsova's scientific creativity and representing an integral "building" of all lines and directions of the study of the lexical system of language, outlining the prospects for further research. Two years later Professor Kuznetsova publishes the textbook "Lexicology of the Russian Language", in which the object and subject of lexicology are defined and described in detail, different aspects of lexical studies, and phraseology is presented as a special part of the lexical system of language.

In language Kuznetsova searches for and finds primordials, which, as one article about her says, "cement the infinite variety of concrete phenomena and help establish their inner order". Using her own method of step-by-step identification of the lexical meaning of a word, Kuznetsova was on her way to "a holistic scientific view of the lexical-semantic system of the Russian language." Nowadays, the thesis of the systemic structure of language is fundamental.

Era Kuznetsova conceived to read all the disciplines of the course "Modern Russian", from phonetics to syntax, and launched the project. She is the author and editor of monographs, another textbook has been published - "Language in the light of the system approach", several collections, many reports have been made at interuniversity conferences.

The Ural Semantic School Today

Era Vasilievna passed away in April 1988. At the head of the Ural Semantic School is its best and favorite student Lyudmila Babenko, now Professor, Head of the Department of Fundamental and Applied Linguistics and Textual Science at Ural Federal University, Honorary Worker of Higher Professional Education, Honored Scientist of the Russian Federation.

Today the school has more than 60 researchers, including 10 doctors and more than 40 candidates of science. The priority areas of their work are the study of word, sentence and text semantics, revealing the regularities of the systemic organization of Russian vocabulary, ideographic description of words of different parts of speech - verbs, nouns, adjectives, synonyms; theory and practice of creating dictionaries of a principally new type, reflecting the elements of the language world picture, most significant for the Russian national consciousness.

22 dictionaries (including several Large Explanatory Dictionaries), over 30 monographs, 15 textbooks and study guides, over 20 collections of scientific articles and conference proceedings - this is a concise, but capacious description of the Ural Semantic School. The publication of the Big Explanatory Ideographic Dictionary of Synonyms of Russian Speech is coming to an end.

"At present it has become possible for the collective of the Ural Semantic School to realize the unprecedented task of compiling a complete semantic ideographic dictionary of the Russian language (including such parts of speech as adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, particles, interjections), indicating synonyms and antonyms, grammar, orthoepy, stylistic, culturological and other characteristics. We are talking about the reconstruction of the entire Russian national language picture of the world, its universal and specific components, the regularities of its formation. This Universal Ideographic Dictionary of the Russian Language will logically summarize all the previous projects of our department", emphasizes Lyudmila Babenko.

Recognition by the linguistic community in Russia and abroad, numerous collective prizes and personal awards, support from the Russian Ministry of Science and Higher Education, the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, the Russian Science Foundation, active cooperation with leading Russian researchers (including those from the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow State University and St. Petersburg State University) and scientists from Spain, Germany, Finland, Belarus, China, Japan and Taiwan - this is the Ural Semantic School, whose foundation was laid by Era Kuznetsova.

The news article was translated by UrFU International Marketing Office
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