Born October 19 1932, Odessa, Ukraine. Canadian nationality. Married.
Full Professor, Department of Linguistics and Translation, Université de Montréal.

Education and university degrees

• 1950-1956 : University studies, Chair of Romano-Germanic Philology, Moscow University
• 1956 : Master's degree in Linguistics, Moscow University (Comparative study of the semantics of the nouns of body parts in French and Spanish)
• 1962 : PhD in Linguistics, Institute of Linguistics, USSR Academy of Sciences, (Theoretical problems of automatic text analysis)

Professional experience

Associate Researcher at the Institute of Linguistics, USSR Academy of Sciences, Moscow (was expelled for political reasons) (1956-1976).

Research work in linguistics funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and other Canadian and Quebec organizations (nine major grants since 1978 to date) (since 1978).

Teaching experience

General Linguistics lectures given several times at Novosibirsk University ; various lectures and seminars given at universities and computer centers in the USSR (1960-1975).

Several lectures at the University of Montreal (semantics, morphology, lexicography) ; supervision of several master's theses, five doctoral dissertations (defended) (since 1977).

Several linguistics lectures abroad : University of California at Los Angeles, Boston University, University of Delaware at Newark, University of Melbourne, University of Canberra, University of Vienna, University of Munich, University of Paris-XIII.

Visiting Professor at the Collège de France, holding the annual International Chair (1996-1997).

Research interests

General Linguistics theory ; semantics, syntax and morphology ; lexicography (especially French) ; Russian studies, description of " exotic " languages (African, Australian, Siberian, Caucasian) ; natural language in artificial intelligence research; metalinguistics (= linguistic terminology). Publications in all these fields.

Learned societies and academies

• 1974 : Member of the Société de linguistique de Paris
• 1979 : Member of the American Linguistic Society
• 1979 : Member of the Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States
• 1981 : Member of the Association for Computational Linguistics
• 1983 : Member of the Societas Linguistica Europea
• 1994 : Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada

Awards and honors

• 1977 : Honorary doctorate from the University of Besançon, France
• 1988-1989 : Two Killam Research Fellowships, Canada
• 1990 : John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, USA
• 1991 : Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize, Germany