Recalling One Pioneering Paper, or Semantics and its Formalization in 1961
An review is given of the paper «On fundamental importance of taking account of semantics in machine translation» published in 1961 by A.K. Zholkovskiy, N.N. Leont'yeva, and Yu.S. Martem'yanov. It is argued that the paper in question not only introduced new means of formalized linguistic description that were more powerful and more adequate for the tasks of the day, but also revealed and defined a broad range of linguistic problems that until then had gone largely unheeded. Moreover, it pioneered in outlining the ways and principles of solving these problems that have retained their scientific validity up to the present time, thus becoming the source and building block for a variety of schools and avenues of studies on syntax and semantics in today's theoretical and computational linguistics.