Sergei Evgenyevich Yakhontov (1926-2018)

The Russian linguist Sergei E. Yakhontov (Sergej Evgen'evič Jaxontov, Yǎhóngtuōfū 雅洪托夫 in Chinese) passed away on January 28, 2018. He was 91 years old. Jaxontov undoubtedly was one of the best scholars of his generation in Chinese linguistics, and a distinguished researcher in comparative and general linguistics as well.

Graduated in 1950 from the Oriental Faculty of Leningrad State University, Sergej E. Jaxontov has been a student of Alexandr Alexandrovič Dragunov (1900-1955, Lóng Guǒfū 龙果夫 in Chinese) and has further advanced many ideas and insights of his professor, creating what is now known as the St. Petersburg (Leningrad) School of Sino- Tibetan linguistics.

As early as in 1960, he made decisive contributions to Old Chinese phonology, proposing the medial *-l- as a consonant and a rounded vowel *o (hypothesis that Old Chinese had no freely occurring medial *-w-) predicting the existence of rhyming distinctions not recognized in the traditional analysis, which led him to submit a seven-vowel system with rather restricted distribution. (See the translation of Jaxontov's (1960) paper in Norman's (1970) English translation and also Jaxontov (1983, 1986))

The medial *-l- was later treated as *-r- by subsequent researchers: Pulleyblank 1962 who reported having independently arrived at the same idea of a *-l- medial and who thereafter substituted *-r- for his earlier *-l-, and also Baxter (1992, 262) who recognized that Jaxontov's original proposal was based, among other factors, on the fact that the contrast between division II vowels and other vowels does not appear after Middle Chinese initial l-.

This seven-vowel system was modified by Bodman (1971) to result in a six-vowel system, a model first formally proposed by Bodman's student Baxter (1980). This six-vowel system is now accepted by many researchers who have reconstructed Tibeto-Burman on the basis of a six-vowel system of Old Chinese, yielding a proto-language with the same six vowels as Old Chinese (see, among others, Hill 2012, Sagart and Baxter 2017).

While S. E. Jaxontov may mostly be remembered as an ingenious phonologist, his research was by no means limited to Old Chinese phonology. Like his mentor A. A. Dragunov who published a masterpiece on Chinese parts of speech in the 1950's ([1952]1955), he was also a very inspired syntactician and semanticist, being able to compare a wide range of languages with a sound theoretical apparatus capable of isolating the most important syntactical and semantic parameters and to draw significant generalizations from a cross-linguistic perspective.

His analyses of the resultative constructions in general linguistics and mainly in Chinese linguistics, dating from 1983 in Russian and later translated into English in 1988 (see Jaxontov 1988a, 1988b), have influenced many young scholars and continue to serve as an indispensable reference work on Chinese resultative constructions. He and his colleague Vladimir Nedjalkov understood resultatives as all verb forms being used to describe a state in the paradigm of dynamic verbs of action and process. More specifically, they defined resultatives as "those verbs that express a state implying a previous event" (Nedjalkov and Jaxontov 1988, 6), i.e. they are "all verb forms and regular deverbal derivatives that may express states, both resultatives and statives" (Nedjalkov and Jaxontov 1988, 7).

In Jaxontov (1988b)—exclusively devoted to Chinese resultatives—in the same volume, S. E. Jaxontov developed his monograph of 1957 on the verbal category in Chinese, insisting that Chinese resultatives could be regarded as verb forms with affixes, since they could involve the suffix -zhe 着. All later studies on the status of -zhe in Mandarin are indebted to S. E. Jaxontov (see Smith 1991, Yasuhiro Shirai 1998). As Chen Qianrui (2012, 28) has shown, "the properties of a predicate, in Nedjalkov & Jaxontov's view (1988), are similar to the situation types described by Smith (1991: 38)."

Sergej E. Jaxontov also was an excellent typologist. He was one of the first scholars—if not the first—to single out the Jìn dialects as a separate group in a couple of publications including Jaxontov (1966, 1967). This analysis, using the grammaticalization of full words into empty...