Aronson South Slavic and Balkan Linguistics

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American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

South Slavic and Balkan LinguisticsAuthor(s): Howard I. AronsonSource: The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 31, Thirtieth Anniversary Issue (1987), pp.191-195Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European LanguagesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/307988

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SOUTH SLAVICAND 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

andEastEuropean

Journal. These are listed as follows.

Author Title Year Vol. Pages

Allen, Robert F. On the derivational pattern of the 1977 21 378-84

Bulgarian verb

Aronson, Howard I. Vowel/Zero alternations in the Bulgarian 1962 6 34-38

inflection

Augerot, James E. The conjugation of the Rumanian verb 1974 18 47-55

Bidwell, Charles E. The phonemics and morphophonemics 1963 7 160-65

of Serbo-Croatian stress

Butler, Thomas J. Jernej Kopitar's role in the Serbian 1969 13 479-88

language controversy

Elson, Mark J. The definite article in Bulgarianand 1976 20 273-79

Macedonian

Freidman, Victor A. Structural and generativeapproaches to 1976 20 460-64

analysis of the Macedonian preterite

Gotlb, Zbigniew "Balkanisms" n the South Slavic 1962 6 138-42

languages

GolIb, Zbigniew Syntactic redundance 1964 8 37-41

Ivic, Pavle Basic problems and current research 1961 5 103-9

in Yugoslav dialectology

Kantor, Marvin A note on verbal prefixes s-, sa-, su- in 1972 16 319-23

Serbo-Croatian

Klagstad, Harold The phonemic system of colloquial 1958 16/2 42-54

L., Jr. standard Bulgarian

Lazic, Margarita Prefixation of borrowed words in 1976 20 50-59

Serbocroatian

Leed, Richard L. The intonation of yes-no questions in 1968 12 330-36

Serbo-Croatian

SEEJ, Vol. 31, Anniversary Issue (1987) 191



192 Slavic and East European Journal

Author

Levenberg, Joel

Milivojevic, Dragan

Naylor, Kenneth E.

Perkowski, J. L. &

Emil Vrabie

tehik, Vladimir

Scatton,Ernest A.

Schenker,Alexander M.

Stankiewicz,Edward

Surdu6ki,Milan

Surdu6ki,Milan

Van Campen,

Joseph

Title

On the conjugation of velar consonant

stems in Serbo-Croatian

Textbooks of Serbo-Croatian in English:a review article

The classification of Serbo-Croatian

dialects

Covert semantic and morphophonemic

categories in the Romanian gender system

Classes of morphological change in

Slovenian

The alternation e - a inBulgarian

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

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 linguisticsin 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

Vol.

29

12

10

30

11

17

15/1

17/3

Pages

313-24

341-50

453-57

54-67

191-95

427-32272-79

144-59

Year

1985

1968

1966

1986

1967

1973

1957

1959

1964

1970

1962

8 159-81

14 36-46

6 143-47



South Slavic and Baltic Linguistics 193

Of the articles published, ten dealt primarilywith Serbocroatian, six with

Bulgarian, three with Macedonian, and two each with Slovenian andRumanian. 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 major-

ity of the synchronic articles are in the domain of phonetics, phonology,

and morphophonology. Articles covering the semantics of grammaticalcategories are very few in number and are among the relatively later con-

tributions. After 1956, the transformational-generativeapproach to linguis-tic 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 structuralismhas tended to prevail. Still, it is

surprising that there is an almost total absence of articles of a syntacticnature, particularly in the Chomskyan tradition. Diachronic linguistics and

studies dealing with the history of literary languages, the latter a majorconcern 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 followingthe 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 devel-

oped originally primarily in Slavic lands and that a highly significantnumber 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 contrib-

uted two articles (1964, 1970) and Zbigniew Goltb, who also contributed

two articles (1962, 1964). With only a few exceptions (Ivic, Lazic, Milivo-

jevic, Vrabie, SurduEkiand, 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 con-

tributorswere not from American or Canadian institutions: Pavle Ivic(NoviSad) and Vladimir Rehak (University of Zagreb). With the exception of

these two, Zb. Golab, and E. Vrabie, to the best of my knowledge all con-

tributors are the products of North American doctoral programs.



194 SlavicandEastEuropeanournal

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 Americandegrees 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 lan-

guages have appeared. These come from the pens of 46 reviewers. (Interest-

ingly, 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, read-

ers, etc.): T. Magner, Introduction to the Serbo-Croatian language (1957,

63),3A.

Kadic,Croatianreader with

vocabulary(1958),A.B.

Lord, BeginningSerbocroatian(1950), C.T. Hodge, et al., Bulgarianbasic course(1963), A.B.

Lord, BeginningBulgarian(1963), A.B. Lord and D.E. Bynum, A Bulgarian

literaryreader(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-Croatianlanguage (1983). Four are lexico-

graphic: J. Paternost, Slovenian-Englishdictionaryof linguistic terms(1968),T. Magner, The student's dictionary of Serbo-Croatian: Serbo-Croatian-

English, 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 contemporarystandard Slovene (1968), C.E. Bidwell, Outline ofSlovenian morphology(1971), J. Paternost, FromEnglish to Slovenian:prob-lems in translationequivalence(1971), R.L. Lencek, The structure and 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 Kajkaviandialekt (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,Structuralgrammar 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 morpho-

phonology (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 diachronyand 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 domi-nant form of scholarly publication of linguists in general and Slavic linguistsin particular. In addition, it must be remembered, many of the scholars

working in fields of South Slavic and Balkan linguistics also are active in



South Slavic and Baltic Linguistics 195

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 literaturedealing with the South Slavic and Balkan languages published in the non-

Slavic countries of Europe far more thoroughly than they have works pub-lished 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

ofscholarship dealing

with South Slavic and Balkanlinguistics

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 clearlyfrom 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 inthe Magner Festschrift (vol.6, no.3). Thus, these two publications, alone, account for 81

articles in approximately the same period that SEEJpublished 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 / Introductionto the Croatian and Serbianlanguage (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 reviewedwork.

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Aronson South Slavic and Balkan Linguistics