514 Barbara H. Partee and Vladimir Borschev A memorial remembrance of Aleksandr Kibrik BARBARA H. PARTEE and VLADIMIR BORSCHEV I first met Aleksandr Evgen’evich Kibrik when he invited me to an interna- tional conference at Moscow State University (MGU) in February 1995. 1 My subsequent marriage to Vladimir Borschev, an old and close friend of Kibrik’s, and my frequent teaching at MGU in the past 17 years, led to our becoming good friends and colleagues. I saw and admired how Kibrik helped students at MGU develop the skills and contacts that have enabled them to win fellowships and postdoctoral positions in Europe and the U.S. The changes over the last 17 years have been huge – by now many young Russian linguists move easily between two worlds that are no longer so sharply divided. And as young Russian linguists who come from Moscow become known in the West, their work is especially valued for its typological richness, thanks to their excellent education and thanks to their experience in the remarkable linguistic expeditions that Aleksandr Evgen’evich and his teams have led them on, expeditions focused as much on the education of future generations of field linguists as on the studied languages, and for which there is no equivalent in the west. Vladimir Borschev was on five expeditions with Kibrik between 1981 and 1988, and wrote diaries which he published, along with supplementary essays by Kibrik and others, and some expedition songs and photographs, in Borschev (2001). He was not there as a linguist but as Kibrik’s friend and, as Kibrik wrote in his foreword, “in the capacity of a volunteer muzhik”. Those diaries can now be seen as a kind of testament to Kibrik; they paint a vivid picture of the skills and energy and devotion to his students and colleagues that made Kibrik such a genius in the organization of the expeditions and the valuable published linguistic analyses that resulted. One thing that struck me in Moscow was that although I perceived oc- casional tension concerning the relation between on the one hand Kibrik’s functional-typological orientation and work of that kind that has grown and 1. Both of us submitted short remarks for the Kibrik memorial event at ALT 10 in Leipzig: my husband’s remarks were mainly personal, so for our joint contribution to this publication, we are using mainly an excerpt from BHP’s, with one short paragraph adapted from VB’s. The 1st person pronoun here is BHP. We also wrote related pieces for a memorial event in Moscow (Borschev 2012, Partee 2012). Linguistic Typology 17 (2013), 514–516 1430–0532/2013/017-0514 DOI 10.1515/lingty-2013-0028 ©Walter de Gruyter Brought to you by | University of New England Authenticated Download Date | 6/1/15 6:53 AM