Researcher, Department of African Languages
Was employed at the Department of African Languages of the Institute of Linguistics in the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1971.
In 1966, he graduated from the Division of Structural and Applied Linguistics, the Faculty of Philology of the Lomonosov Moscow State University.
In 1967-1971, he studied at the postgraduate program at the Institute of Linguistics, and in 1971 he became an employee there.
During his studies at the Lomonosov Moscow State University, he initiated the traditional Olympiads in languages and mathematics for high school students (now the traditional Olympiads in linguistics), and during the following years, he was the author of numerous self-sufficient tasks in linguistics for the Olympiads and other purposes.
He had a very diverse range of research interests, including, in particular, sound symbolism, sociolinguistics, paremiology, and the theory of the linguistic problem as a genre.
Selected publications
- Aksenova Irina, Vetoshkina Tatiana, Zhurinskiy Alfred. Klassy slov v jazykax Afriki [Word classes in African languages]. Moscow, Nauka, 1984.
- Zhurinskiy Alfred. Vzaimodejstvie evropejskix i mestnyx jazykov v Afrike [Interaction of European and local languages in Africa]. PhD thesis. Moscow, Institute of Linguistics of the USSR Academy of Sciences, 1985.
- Zhurinskiy Alfred. Semantičeskaja struktura zagadki. Nemetaforičeskie preobrazovanija smysla [Semantic structure of the riddle. Non-metaphorical transformations of meaning]. Moscow, Nauka, 1989.
- Zhurinskiy Alfred. Slovo, bukva, čislo. Obsuždenie samodostatočnyx lingvističeskix zadač c razborom sta obrazcov žanra [Word, letter, number. Discussion of self-sufficient linguistic tasks with the analysis of one hundred genre samples]. Moscow, Nauka, 1993.
- Zhurinskiy Alfred. Lingvistika v zadačax. Uslovija, rešenija, kommentarii [Linguistics in tasks. Requirements, solutions, comments]. Compiled by Elena Muravenko. Moscow, Indrik, 1994.