Vladimir Mikhaylovich Alpatov

He graduated from the Department of theoretical and applied linguistics of the Philological faculty of the Moscow State University in 1968.

In 1971 he obtained his Candidate Degree (The grammatical system of politeness forms in modern standard Japanese) at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

In 2012, Vladimir Alpatov was elected the director of the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences for five years.

In his Candidate and Doctoral dissertations, Japanese data were used for tackling more general theoretical questions on the notions of word and morpheme, grammatical category, agglutination and some other problematic issues in general morphology and theory of grammar.

Equally important are his studies on linguistics in the USSR: he is the author of monographs about Mikhail Bakhtin and Valentin Voloshinov, about the fate of many Slavic and Turkic scholars during the period of Great Purge, about the controversial personality of Nicholas Marr and the fate of his Japhetic theory.