Prof. Cynthia Vakareliyska (University of Oregon) will present this year's Kenneth E. Naylor Memorial Lecture on Friday April 27th at 3:30pm. The title of her talk is: Action Heroes: The English NN Construction across the South Slavic Languages. A reception will follow the talk.
The topic of this talk is the post-1990 adoption into Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian of English-type phrases like “action hero” and “Internet store”, in which a noun is preceded by another noun that acts as an adjective to modify it. These sequences of two nouns are known as N[N] constructions. They are particularly interesting because they are a major violation of fundamental Slavic grammar rules, which require that all modifiers that precede a noun have an adjective suffix. Nevertheless, almost all of the Slavic languages have adopted the modifying noun directly from English, without adding the required adjective suffix, and have translated only the second, head noun.
The talk, which is based largely on research conducted in Sofia, Bulgaria in 2008, 2010, and 2011, focuses on the mechanisms behind how and why N[N] constructions have made their way into the different South Slavic languages, and proposes a cognitive hypothesis for why Bulgarian appears to be far ahead of the other South Slavic languages in its use of N[N]’s.
Cynthia Vakareliyska is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Oregon. She joined the faculty as an Assistant Professor of Slavic Linguistics in 1994, after having been Assistant Professor of Russian at Georgetown University from 1990-1994. She earned her Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. A specialist in Bulgarian and Medieval Slavic, she is the author of The Missing Folia from the Banica Gospel: Equivalent Passages from the Curzon Gospel, with Annotations (Amsterdam, 1996) and more recently the two-volume work, The Curzon Gospel.Vol. I: An Annotated Edition and vol. II: A Linguistic and Textual Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2008).
For more information, contact the Slavic Department.
This event is sponsored by the Kenneth E. Naylor Professorship. As part of the Naylor Professorship, Professor Brian D. Joseph established an annual Lecture on South Slavic Linguistics in Kenneth Naylor’s memory that brings leading scholars in the field to OSU each Spring for a public lecture.
