Peterson, Mikhail

Born Sept. 22 (Oct. 4), 1885, in Kerensk, now Vadinsk, Penza Oblast; died Nov. 22, 1962, in Moscow. Soviet linguist. Specialist in general and comparative Indo-European linguistics and representative of the Moscow linguistic school.

Peterson graduated from Moscow University in 1913. He became a docent at the university in 1916 and a professor in 1919. He taught the comparative grammar of Indo-European languages as well as Sanskrit, Lithuanian, semantics, Russian syntax, and other subjects. He published works on general linguistics, Lithuanian studies, modern Russian, and modern French. On the whole, he shared the views of F. F. Fortunatov and devoted special attention to syntax, an area that received sparse coverage in Fortunatov’s works. Peterson was the first to apply the statistical method to studies of syntax.