Vladimir Alpatov is a specialist in oriental languages (first of all,
Japanese), he is one of the authors of a collective 2-volume
Theoretical grammar of Japanese (2008). In his Candidate and Doctoral dissertations, Japanese data were used for tackling more general theoretical questions on the notions of word and
morpheme,
grammatical category,
agglutination and some other problematic issues in general
morphology and theory of grammar. Among the main research interests of Vladimir Alpatov is the
history of linguistics. He is one of the leading Russian specialists in this field. He is the author of a comprehensive manual on the history of linguistic studies, which briefly describes the development of these studies from the ancient times to the middle of the twentieth century. Equally important are his studies on linguistics in the USSR: he is the author of monographs about
Mikhail Bakhtin and
Valentin Voloshinov, about the fate of many Slavic and Turkic scholars during the period of
Great Purge, about the controversial personality of
Nicholas Marr and the fate of his
Japhetic theory. Among Alpatov's other works are studies on Japanese
sociolinguistics as well as on the
language policy in the
USSR. ==Major works (books)==