Annual Kenneth E. Naylor Memorial Lectures in South Slavic Linguistics at the Department of Slavic and Eastern European Languages and Cultures at Ohio State
The Kenneth E. Naylor Professorship of South Slavic Linguistics was established on November 5, 1993 in the College of Humanities (now part of the College of Arts and Sciences) through gifts to The Ohio State University from the estate of Professor Naylor. The professorship is a five-year renewable appointment, dedicated to preserving and continuing the scholarly legacy of Dr. Naylor.
Professor Kenneth E. Naylor received his bachelor's degree in French linguistics from Cornell University and his master's degree in linguistics from Indiana University. At Indiana, he began to study Slavic with Professor Edward Stankiewicz, and when Professor Stankiewicz moved to the University of Chicago, Kenneth Naylor went with him. There he received his doctorate in Russian and South Slavic linguistics in 1966.
Dr. Naylor was an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh from 1964 to 1966, when he joined the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures at The Ohio State University. At the time of his death, Professor Naylor was the Acting Director of OSU's Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies.
Professor Naylor was the recipient of numerous awards, grants and fellowships, including ones from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright program, and the countries of Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, which awarded him medals of honor. In 1990, he testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee on ethnic rivalry in Yugoslavia and the development of the Serbo-Croatian language.
Professor Naylor's research centered on Serbo-Croatian and on South Slavic linguistics in general, and the overwhelming majority of the seventy articles that he authored are on these topics. He also served as editor of several journals. His dedication and many accomplishments live on in his work and in the love of the field he instilled in his students
In 1997 Professor Brian Joseph, became the first appointed Kenneth E. Naylor Professor, and established an annual Lecture on South Slavic Linguistics in Kenneth Naylor's memory that brings leading scholars in the field to OSU each spring to give a public lecture and to speak in Professor Joseph's South Slavic and Balkan classes. Each lecture is subsequently published as a monograph article in the Naylor Lecture Series.
Speakers:
2023
"Avram Mrazović’s linguistic thought and the question of polyvalency in Church Slavic"
Dr. Motoki Nomachi |Slavic-Eurasian Research Center of Hokkaido University
2022
"Torlak in the Slavic Family and Balkan Sprachbund: Linguistic Problems and Methodological Challenges"
Dr. Andrey N. Sobolev | Russian Academy of Sciences & Philipps-University of Marburg
2021
"Cappadocian (Asia Minor Greek): The Life and Times of a Language Once Believed Extinct"
Dr. Mark Janse | Ghent University
2019
"Greek Dialect Features in the Speech of Greek Canadians: An Unexpected Treasure Trove"
Dr. Panayiotis Pappas | Simon Fraser University
2018
"Language Planning and Its Limits: the Case of Croatian"
Dr. Keith Langston | University of Georgia
2017
To mark the 20th anniversary of the Kenneth E. Naylor Memorial Lecture, all previous Naylor lecturers were invited to Ohio State to participate in a two-day symposium "The Current State of Balkan Linguistics - Where Do We Stand?"
2016
“Do We Really Write in a More Complex Way than We Speak? The case of Bulgarian”
Dr. John Leafgren | University of Arizona
2015
"Observations on the Lexicon of the Earliest Macedonian Vernacular Gospels (Konikovo and Kulakia Gospels)”
Dr. Joseph Schallert | University of Toronto
2014
"Reimagining the Balkans and Widening the Bund: Does Moldova Belong?”
Dr. Donald Dyer | University of Mississippi
2013
"The Rise of Modern Bulgarian Literacy in the Seventeenth Century: New Facts and Interpretations”
Dr. Olga M. Mladenova | University of Calgary
2012
"Action Heroes: The English NN Construction Across the South Slavic Languages”
Dr. Cynthia Vakareliyska | University of Oregon
2011
"The New Bulgarian: Turkisms and Europeansims in the Language of Bai Ganyo and Nov Zhivot”
Dr. Catherine Rudin | Wayne State College
2010
"South Slavic and its Neighbors-Distant Past and Present”
Dr. Eric P. Hamp | University of Chicago
2009
"The Line, the Which, and the War Trope”
Dr. Marc L. Greenberg | University of Kansas
2008
"Language Planning in the Yugoslav Successor States: New Languages and Old Controversies”
Dr. Robert Greenberg| University of Auckland
2007
"Why We Need History in Doing Balkan Linguistics”
Dr. Brian Joseph | Ohio State University
2006
"From Phonological Analysis at my Desk to Linguistic Activism with Slovene in the Austrian Alps”
Dr. Tom Priestly | University of Alberta
2005
“Discourse Markers as Balkanisms”
Dr. Grace Fielder | University of Arizona
2004
"The Structure of the Deseterac – The Metre of Serbian Epic Poetry”
Dr. Ilse Lehiste | The Ohio State University
2003
"The Anthropocentric Case Theory: How is Man Realized in Discourse”
Dr. Zuzanna Topolinksa | Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts
2002
"Minority Language Rights in Primary Education: A Century of Change in the Balkans”
Dr. Christina E. Kramer | University of Toronto
2001
“The Balkan Linguistic League, “Orientalism”, and Linguistic Typology”
Dr. Howard Aronson | University of Chicago
2000
“What is a Standard Language Good for and Who gets to Have One? And Open and Closed Accent Types in Nouns in Serbo-Croation”
Dr. Wayles Browne | Cornell University
1999
"In Honor of Diversity: The Linguistic Riches of the Balkans”
Dr. Ronelle Alexander | University of California, Berkeley
1998
"Linguistics Emblems and Emblematic Languages: On Languages as Flags in the Balkans”
Dr. Victor Friedman | University of Chicago