American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

South Slavic and Balkan Linguistics Author(s): Howard I. Aronson Source: The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 31, Thirtieth Anniversary Issue (1987), pp. 191-195 Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/307988 Accessed: 21/06/2009 15:29
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SOUTH SLAVIC AND BALKAN LINGUISTICS

Howard I. Aronson, University of Chicago

In the thirty years since 1957 a total of twenty-five articles dealing with questions of South Slavic and Balkan linguistics have appeared in the Slavic and East EuropeanJournal. These are listed as follows.
Author Allen, Robert F. Title On the derivational pattern of the Bulgarian verb Year 1977 1962 1974 1963 1969 1976 1976 1962 1964 1961 1972 1958 1976 1968 Vol. 21 6 18 7 13 20 20 6 8 5 16 16/2 20 12 Pages 378-84 34-38 47-55 160-65 479-88 273-79 460-64 138-42 37-41 103-9 319-23 42-54 50-59 330-36

Aronson, Howard I. Vowel/Zero alternations in the Bulgarian inflection Augerot, James E. The conjugation of the Rumanian verb

Bidwell, Charles E. The phonemics and morphophonemics of Serbo-Croatian stress Butler, Thomas J. Elson, Mark J. Jernej Kopitar's role in the Serbian language controversy The definite article in Bulgarian and Macedonian

Freidman, Victor A. Structural and generative approaches to analysis of the Macedonian preterite Gotlb, Zbigniew GolIb, Zbigniew Ivic, Pavle Kantor, Marvin Klagstad, Harold L., Jr. Lazic, Margarita Leed, Richard L. "Balkanisms"in the South Slavic languages Syntactic redundance Basic problems and current research in Yugoslav dialectology A note on verbal prefixes s-, sa-, su- in Serbo-Croatian The phonemic system of colloquial standard Bulgarian Prefixation of borrowed words in Serbocroatian The intonation of yes-no questions in Serbo-Croatian

SEEJ, Vol. 31, Anniversary Issue (1987)

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192 Author

Slavic and East European Journal Title On the conjugation of velar consonant stems in Serbo-Croatian Year 1985 1968 1966 1986 1967 1973 1957 1959 Vol. 29 12 10 30 11 17 15/1 17/3 Pages 313-24 341-50 453-57 54-67 191-95 427-32 272-79 144-59

Levenberg, Joel

Milivojevic, Dragan Textbooks of Serbo-Croatian in English: a review article Naylor, Kenneth E. The classification of Serbo-Croatian dialects Perkowski, J. L. & Covert semantic and morphophonemic Emil Vrabie categories in the Romanian gender system tehik, Vladimir Scatton, Ernest A. Schenker, Alexander M. Stankiewicz, Edward Surdu6ki, Milan Surdu6ki, Milan Van Campen, Joseph Classes of morphological change in Slovenian The alternation e - a in Bulgarian Slavic linguistics in today's Yugoslavia Accent and vowel alternations in the substantive declension of modern standard Slovenian The distribution of Serbo-Croatian consonants The analytic comparative in Serbo-Croatian Altrnative solutions to a problem in Bulgarian morphology

1964 1970 1962

8 14 6

159-81 36-46 143-47

As can be seen from the chart below, there has been a rather marked decline in the number of articles dealing with South Slavic and Balkan linguistics in the past ten years, with only four articles appearing in this decade.1

57-61

62-66

67-71

72-76

77-81

82-86

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Of the articles published, ten dealt primarily with Serbocroatian, six with Bulgarian, three with Macedonian, and two each with Slovenian and Rumanian. In addition, one article (Gotab 1962) dealt with South Slavic in general and one (Schenker 1957) with Slavic linguistics in Yugoslavia. With the exception of Golab 1962) and Elson (1976), linguistic borders are not crossed in the articles; there is a striking absence of comparative studies, be they South Slavic or Balkan. The overwhelming majority of the articles dealt with questions of synchronic linguistics. Only kiehak 1967, Butler 1969, and, to a certain extent, Golab 1962 dealt with historical topics. The majority of the synchronic articles are in the domain of phonetics, phonology, and morphophonology. Articles covering the semantics of grammatical categories are very few in number and are among the relatively later contributions. After 1956, the transformational-generative approach to linguistic analysis deriving from the works of Noam Chomsky gradually becomes the dominant approach in American linguistics and syntax becomes the center of linguistic attention. Nonetheless, this new approach has had less success among Slavists, where structuralism has tended to prevail. Still, it is surprising that there is an almost total absence of articles of a syntactic nature, particularly in the Chomskyan tradition. Diachronic linguistics and studies dealing with the history of literary languages, the latter a major concern in South Slavic linguistics, are almost totally lacking also (see, however, Butler 1969). Articles following the American Descriptivist school are found in the earlier years, where they compete with articles following the structuralist tradition. This latter tradition, in various versions, remains dominant in articles dealing with South Slavic and Balkan linguistics. This should not be surprising given both the fact that structuralism was developed originally primarily in Slavic lands and that a highly significant number of Slavic linguists today are either students of Roman Jakobson or students of students of Jakobson. With two exceptions, no author contributed more than one article in the areas of South Slavic and Balkan linguistics: Milan SurduEki,who contributed two articles (1964, 1970) and Zbigniew Goltb, who also contributed two articles (1962, 1964). With only a few exceptions (Ivic, Lazic, Milivojevic, Vrabie, SurduEki and, perhaps, Rehak), the authors of these articles are not native speakers of the South Slavic or Balkan languages with which they deal. This reflects the fact that the majority of scholars in this field in America are not native speakers of these languages. Only two of the contributors were not from American or Canadian institutions: Pavle Ivic (Novi Sad) and Vladimir Rehak (University of Zagreb). With the exception of these two, Zb. Golab, and E. Vrabie, to the best of my knowledge all contributors are the products of North American doctoral programs.

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Journal SlavicandEastEuropean

Linguists publishing articles on Slavic South and Balkan linguistics have tended to do so rather early in their careers; there is a very small number of contributions from senior scholars. In fact, for those scholars with American degrees for whom I have the date of the Ph.D., contributions appear an average of 4.7 years after completion of the doctoral dissertation. Approximately 85 reviews dealing with the South Slavic and Balkan languages have appeared. These come from the pens of 46 reviewers. (Interestingly, of the 46 reviewers, only 9 have also contributed articles in the field of South Slavic and Balkan linguistics.) Of the 85 works reviewed, 29, are by American scholars.2 Of these 9 are pedagogical works (textbooks, readers, etc.): T. Magner, Introduction to the Serbo-Croatian language (1957, 63),3 A. Kadic, Croatianreader with vocabulary(1958), A.B. Lord, Beginning Serbocroatian(1950), C.T. Hodge, et al., Bulgarian basic course (1963), A.B. Lord, Beginning Bulgarian (1963), A.B. Lord and D.E. Bynum, A Bulgarian literary reader (1970), T.F. Magner, Introductionto the Croatian and Serbian language (1972), M. Gobetz and B. Loncar, Slovenian language manual, 1 (1978) 2 (1980), G. Lukic, Serbo-Croatian language (1983). Four are lexicographic: J. Paternost, Slovenian-Englishdictionary of linguistic terms (1968), T. Magner, The student's dictionary of Serbo-Croatian: Serbo-CroatianEnglish, English-Serbo-Croatian (1971), M. Benson, Serbocroatian-English dictionary (1972), M. Benson, An English-Serbo-Croatiandictionary (1980). Of the remaining 17 reviews, 5 deal with Slovenian: R. Lencek, The verb pattern of contemporary standard Slovene (1968), C.E. Bidwell, Outline of Slovenian morphology (1971), J. Paternost, From English to Slovenian:problems in translationequivalence(1971), R.L. Lencek, The structureand history of the Slovene language (1983), R.L. Lencek and H.R. Cooper, Papers in Slavic philology to honor Jernij Kopitar (1985); 4 deal with Serbocroatian: I. Lehiste and Pavle Ivic, Accent in Serbo-Croatian: an experimental study (1964), T.F. Magner, A Zagreb Kajkavian dialekt (1967), T.F. Magner and L. Matejka, Word accent in modern Serbo-Croatian (1972), T. Butler, Monumenta Serbocroatica (1981); 3 deal with Albanian: L. Newmark, Structural grammar of Albanian (1958), G.L. Bevington, Albanianphonology (1975), M.E. Hild, Basic Albanian etymologies (1985); one each deals with Bulgarian and Macedonian: H.I. Aronson, Bulgarian inflectional morphophonology (1970) and V.A. Friedman, The grammatical categories of the Macedonian indicative (1979); and one deals with the Balkan languages in general: B.D. Joseph, The diachrony and synchrony of the Balkan infinitive (1985). This relatively small number of monographs by North American scholars reviewed (under 20 in 30 years) reflects the fact that articles are the dominant form of scholarly publication of linguists in general and Slavic linguists in particular. In addition, it must be remembered, many of the scholars working in fields of South Slavic and Balkan linguistics also are active in

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other linguistic fields, both Slavic and non-Slavic and many have published monographs which deal with these other areas. I think it fair to say that the reviews have covered scholarly literature dealing with the South Slavic and Balkan languages published in the nonSlavic countries of Europe far more thoroughly than they have works published in Slavic countries. Clearly, in my field of Bulgarian linguistics, there are a number of significant works published in Sofia that were not reviewed. This is most likely due to the fact that East European publishing houses, unlike those of Western Europe, are less likely to send review copies to journals such as SEEJ. Again, it should be noted that in general, in the West, the dominant form of scholarship dealing with South Slavic and Balkan linguistics tend to be the article, rather than the monograph. NOTES
1 This decline does not, however, reflect a decrease in scholarly interest in South Slavic and Balkan linguistics. Rather, articles in these areas are being submitted elsewhere: to other journals, to Festschriften and to conference proceedings. This can be seen quite clearly from the following statistics: In volumes 23-30 of IJSLP (1981-84) there are 13 articles dealing with this area and in volumes 1-7 (1977-85) of Folia Slavica there are 31 articles, not counting the 27 articles in the Hamp Festschrift (vol. 4, nos. 2-3) and the 10 articles in the Magner Festschrift (vol.6, no.3). Thus, these two publications, alone, account for 81 articles in approximately the same period that SEEJ published four articles. Not included in my count is a pedagogical review article dealing with textbooks of Serbo-Croatian: Milivojevi6, Dragan, "Textbooks of Serbo-Croatian in English: A Review Article" (12, 1968, 341-50) and an article that more properly falls in to the domain of the Church Slavonic tradition and medieval literary history: Birnbaum, Henrik, "Serbian Models in the Literature and Literary Language of Medieval Russia." 2 There are three separate reviews of various editions of Thomas F. Magner's Introduction to the Serbo-Croatian language / Introduction to the Croatian and Serbian language (1957, 1963, 1972), which is only counted once here. 3 Dates refer to the date of the review and not the date of publication of the reviewed work.