Ocene, zapiski, poročila - Reviews, Notes, Reports
V ZELENIDRZELIZELENI BREG: STUDIES IN HONOR OF MARC L. GREENBERG. Ed. Stephen M. Dickey and Mark R. Lauersdorf. Bloomington, Indiana: Slavica Publishers, 2018. 395 pp.
December of last year saw the publication of a volume of essays honoring Professor Marc L. Greenberg and his outstanding contribution to the field of Slavic linguistics as well as his role in promoting foreign languages in American higher education. The title of the volume itself (transl. In a green country a green hill), while playing on the witty "calquability" of Marc's last name Greenberg into Slovene, zeleni breg, seems entirely fitting, as it points both to his broad interest in researching, and proficiency in, a number of Slavic languages (Slovene, Croatian, Czech, Russian). The fact that in addition to these, he reads and to some extent speaks Albanian, German, French, Hungarian, Italian, Turkish and Yiddish, speaks of his great intellectual curiosity, his professional ambition and polyglot talent as well as his international engagement in the academic community.
The volume starts with the editors' preface, tabula gratulatoria, and a list of major publications by Marc L. Green-berg, which is then followed by the 18 essays, in alphabetical order, that make up the body of the book. Each of these will be presented briefly, but first, we need to say a few words about Professor Greenberg himself. Both his life and his academic career are extremely rich and impressive. After earning his M.A. in Comparative Slavic Linguistics at the University of Chicago, he enrolled in the doctoral program at UCLA. As a recipient of the Fulbright-Hays grant (1988-1990), he traveled to Russia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and
the former Yugoslavia, where he developed an intense interest in and affection for the Prekmurje dialect of Slovene. Conducting fieldwork in the region, he mastered the dialect and completed his studies in 1990 by defending his dissertation A Historical Analysis of the Phonology and Accentuation of the Prekmurje Dialect of Slovene. An expanded version of his dissertation was later published as A Historical Phonology of the Slovene Language and, in 2002, received an award for the "Best Book in Slavic Linguistics". While historical linguistics remains at the heart of his research interests, it does not define them entirely. His extensive bibliography includes two versions, in print and electronic form, of a reference grammar of Slovene (2006, 2008), over 30 articles dealing with Slovene linguistics, Slavic comparative linguistics, sociolinguis-tics, dialectology and language contact, as well as numerous encyclopedic and review articles focusing on Slavic languages. Among his more prominent publications we should point out a special issue of The International Journal of the Sociology of Language: The So-ciolinguistics of Slovene (1997), which he edited, while he currently holds the position of editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages and Linguistics to be published by Brill in 2021. He has received a number of prestigious fellowships, such as the ones from National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, and U.S. Department of Education. His scholarly excellence in the field of Slovene and Slavic linguistics was also recognized by the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts which, in 2017, elected him as a corresponding member. In addition to being a brilliant scholar, Marc Greenberg has devoted much time and energy to teaching at the Department
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Ocene, zapiski, poročila - Reviews, Notes, Reports
of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. As a tenured professor he chaired the department for eleven years (2000-11), served as acting Associate Dean of Humanities of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and was instrumental in establishing the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Kansas. As its director since 2016, he has fought for the increased prominence of foreign language study in American higher education. His efforts did not go unnoticed on the national level and from 2014 to 2017 he served on the Executive Committee of the American Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. From the outset of his career, he has been actively engaged in the international academic community. Among the more prominent achievements in this sphere, we should mention his role as co-founder and co-editor of two scientific journals (Slovenski jezik/Slovene Linguistic Studies and Slavia Centralis), his work on the editorial boards of several other international journals (e.g. Lingua Montenegrina) as well as the positions of member and chair of the executive board of the Slavic Linguistic Society. And last but not least, we should also point out his advocacy for Open Access publishing, as he believes that academic and research information should be freely available to the public.
Considering Professor Greenberg's wide-ranging research interests and his success at forging international contacts between scholars, it comes as no surprise that the essays in this volume cover a wide spectrum of topics and languages. Also, the authors come from a range of countries and not all articles are written in English. The authors employ a variety of approaches and methodologies and even though in terms of themes and typology the boundaries between
the articles are not always clear cut, we can perhaps for the sake of greater clarity divide them roughly into two groups: those dealing with diachronic and historical aspects, and those focusing on synchronic aspects, analyzing contemporary or fairly recent linguistic phenomena. In both groups we also find articles that touch upon the dialectal features of Slavic languages.
Among the authors that focus on the historical aspects of Slavic languages, we should mention Stephen M. Dickey, whose paper presents a comparative analysis of the suffixation of prefixed imperfective motion verbs in Russian, Czech, Slovak, Serbian, Slovene, Macedonian and Bulgarian. A comparative approach is also adopted by David J. Birnbaum and Hanne Martine Eckhoff, who discuss problems associated with machine-assisted word alignment between texts written in languages using different writing systems, such as Old Church Slavonic Codex Suprasliensis and its translation from Greek. Marko Snoj, in his article Trije odtenki erne (Eng. transl. Three shades of black), written in Slovene, explores the etymological origins of the Slavic color adjective referring to various dark objects, its reflexes and derivatives through history as well as its semantic features. Marko Jesensek's article on the Prekmurje Standard language and Slovene in the Porabje region combines a diachronic and synchronic approach, describing a period in the development of Slovene when two varieties, one of them being the Prekmurje variety, were competing for the status of Standard Slovene. In the second half of the 19th century, the "battle" was won by the other variety and the Prekmurje variety was downgraded to a dialect. It is still spoken today in its rather archaic form in the Porabje region, but it is limited to
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Ocene, zapiski, poročila - Reviews, Notes, Reports
everyday communication and is gradually disappearing, while schools teach Standard Slovene. Victor A. Friedman and Brian D. Joseph address the issue of historical infinitive-loss in Balkan languages, in Balkan Romani dialects and in Greek, comparing this feature of Balkan sprachbund to Slovene which, on the periphery of the Balkans, has retained the infinitive and is thus relevant for the understanding of the contact-induced convergence of Balkan languages. Joseph Schallert's article similarly draws on the linguistic geography of selected contemporary lexical, morphological and phonological features of the Fakija dialect in Southeastern Bulgaria in order to describe its historical origin. Another article that deviates from a strictly historical approach is the work by Mark R. Lauersdorf on historical standard language development and the writing of historical linguistic identities. In a case study of Slovak, he argues for data-driven historical sociolinguistic approaches to language history that use all data available, including language variation and change, thus providing for a more nuanced account of language development through time and space. By the same token, Gabriela Mucskova in her article on the synthetization and grammaticalization of the preterit in Slovak dialects, argues that the study of synchronic variation and loss of productivity of particular forms can be helpful in explaining the course of historical language change.
The topics addressed by the authors focusing on synchronic aspects are somewhat more diverse than those dealing with historical issues. Three are concerned with sociolinguistic issues. Robert D. Greenberg points to the challenges of language policies on both sides of the Slovenia-Croatia border where, after the disintegration of Yugoslavia,
formerly first-class nations were downgraded to minorities in the newly independent states. Keith Langston uses evidence from corpus data to evaluate the effects of language planning in Croatia since its independence in 1991. He finds that while some changes proposed for Standard Croatian have been accepted and have had some effect on patterns of usage, the overall results vary considerably both in lexicon and in orthography. Nada Sabec discusses a potential language change in Slovene, where she notices a tendency toward less formal ways of addressing the other (T rather than V in addressing a single referent). An increasing use of first rather than last names and titles in addressing the other as well as a shift towards the less formal rather than more formal greetings may be a reflection of the changing social dynamics in today's world, or perhaps partly explained by the influence of English in its role of lingua franca. In his article, Krzysztof E. Borowski examines folk linguistic beliefs about Polish. Analyzing metalinguistic talk in an online forum, he concludes that most discussants consider Silesian variety to be one of the main dialects in Polish, i.e. they are drawing from a standard language ideology. Masako U. Fidler discusses Czech onomatopoeia in non-artistic genres. She combines a quantitative and qualitative approach to study discourse functions of onomatopoeic expressions, finding that these may have sophisticated and perhaps also manipulative effects in that they divert the speech participants' attention away from the specific contents of an event both in oral interaction and social discourse. Laura A. Janda in her article A Stranger in the Lexicon examines the aspectual status of the Russian verb "smoc" ('be able, manage(to)'). Relying on corpus data and comparing "smoc" to other Russian
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Ocene, zapiski, poročila - Reviews, Notes, Reports
verbs, Czech cognates and Spanish translation equivalents, she observes a significant increase in the frequency of its use over the past century. Catherine Rudin's article is an attempt at a syntactic and semantic analysis of two distinct multiple determination constructions in Bulgarian and Macedonian, one literary/standard and the other colloquial, finding that in this case despite some similarities the two languages differ in structure, usage and meaning. Cynthia M. Vakareliyska writes about the recent influx of English noun-noun loanblends into Serbian, comparing the phenomenon to standard Bulgarian and Macedonian. She pays special attention to the orthographic aspects of these loanwords and to the increased frequency of the English-borrowed indeclinable attributive adjectives, particularly in colloquial Serbian. Ani Kokobobo's essay differs from the others in that it does not deal with a linguistic issue but rather analyzes "The Albanian Writers' Union as Mirrored by a Woman", a short story written in 2001 by Ismail Kadare. Ka-dare's struggle for independent artistic expression during the repressive regime of Enver Hoxha is presented as a social commentary on that particular period in Albania. Finally, we take a look at Renee Perelmutter's article A Fur Hat out of a Pig's Tail: Jewish Russian Linguistic Anxieties, Code-Switching, and the Humorous Frame, which deals with humor among Russian Jews in the post-Soviet era. Code switching among multiple Jewish languages from Hebrew, Yiddish and Aramaic allow for the subtle expression of various meanings and help Russian Jews negotiate their evolving identities in the difficult times of political unrest, changes in religious observance, migrations and the like.
Due to space limitations, the articles gathered in this volume celebrating Professor Greenberg's remarkable achievements can only be touched upon very briefly. They are most certainly deserving of a more thorough reading, as they are a well-deserved tribute to his exceptional contribution in all areas of his work: his distinguished scholarship, his tireless and invaluable role in developing and promoting Slavic linguistics in the United States and internationally, and his active engagement in supporting foreign languages in U.S. higher education in the many important administrative positions he has held. Last but not least, the volume is a tribute to him on a more personal level as well, to his very warm, witty personality and superb sense of humor. As the authors of one of the articles in this volume write, Marc is "one of the nicest and most decent human beings in our field and in academia in general /.../ something we say with the greatest of admiration." (p.79).
REFERENCES
Marc L. GREENBERG, 2008: A Short Reference Grammar of Slovene. Munich: LIN-COM.
—, 2006: Short Slovene Reference Grammar. Reference Grammar Network. Duke University/University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill: SEELRC. http://slaviccenters.dukeedu/projec-ts/grammars
—, 2000: A Historical Phonology of the Slovene Language. Heidelberg: Winter C. Universitätsverlag.
— (ed.), 1997: The Sociolinguistics of Slovene. IJSL 124. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Nada Sabec
University of Maribor, nada. sabec@um. si
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