V. A. Dybo (1931–2023)

Vladimir Antonovich was born in the Sumy Oblast of Ukraine, but received his university education in Russia, eventually becoming a doctoral student of Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov at the Moscow State University. In 1958 he became a researcher at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where he would hold a position until the end of his life. In 1962, Vladimir Dybo successfully defended his candidate of sciences thesis, entitled "The issue of correlation between two Balto-Slavic series of accent correspondences in the verbal system". However, it was also in the 1960s that Dybo signed several open letters on human rights authored by Soviet dissidents — a brave action that effectively hindered him from being able to teach at universities, travel abroad to scientific conferences and defend his doctoral dissertation, entitled "An attempt at reconstructing the system of Proto-Slavic accent paradigms" and eventually defended only in 1979.
In addition to Balto-Slavic languages, Vladimir Antonovich applied his experience in comparative historical accentology to the data of Italic, Celtic, Indo-Iranian, and Germanic languages of the Indo-European family; for typological reasons, he also studied the issues of accentology in Abkhaz-Adyghe languages of the Caucasus and Teda-Kanuri languages in Africa.
All of this research led Vladimir Antonovich to develop a general historical typology of accent systems, in which he formulated the principle of dividing morphemes in languages with paradigmatic accent systems into two classes — "dominant" and "recessive".