In Memoriam: Milka Ivi=?iso-8859-2?Q?=E6_?=1923-2011

[E Wayles Browne]

 In Memoriam: Milka Ivić 1923-2011

We regret to announce the death of Milka Ivić in Belgrade on March 7. Professor Ivić taught Slavic and general linguistics for many years at the University of Novi Sad, Yugoslavia (now Serbia), and from 1983 on was a full member of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences (SANU) and the head of several SANU projects including the multi-volume Dictionary of the Serbo-Croatian Literary and National Language (still in progress). In Novi Sad she, with her late husband the dialectologist and phonologist Prof. Pavle Ivić, welcomed and educated many generations of Yugoslav and foreign students of linguistics. Her main topics of research were morphological categories, syntax, and typology. Besides Serbian she had extensive knowledge of virtually all the other Slavic standard languages and many world languages, and not only followed linguistic literature written in all of these but cited examples from them in her work.
Her first book was Značenja srpskohrvatskog instrumentala i njihov razvoj : sintaksičko-semantička studija (Meanings of the Serbo-Croatian Instrumental and their Development: a syntactic-semantic study, 1954), her Ph.D. thesis for Belgrade University. Her thorough survey of worldwide linguistic schools Trends in Linguistics (The Hague: Mouton 1965, Serbian original Pravci u lingvistici, many editions) became the most widely read Serbian or Yugoslav work on linguistics ever, available in Lithuanian, Korean, Polish, Japanese, and Finnish, to name just a few translations.
One of Milka Ivić's best known articles in English was "Non-omissible determiners in Slavic languages", first published in H. G. Lunt, ed., Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Linguistics. The Hague: Mouton 1964 and then reprinted in the reader edited by F. W. Householder, Syntactic Theory 1. Structuralist, Harmondsworth, Penguin 1972. It deals with modifying phrases like "a girl with green eyes" (but not *a girl with eyes).
Another widely-cited article was "Types of direct objects in Serbo-Croatian" in To honor Roman Jakobson: Essays on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, The Hague: Mouton 1967. She published many further studies in Serbian, English, French, and other languages, often taking up a specific case or construction, but invariably showing its place in the entire linguistic system of  Serbo-Croatian or other Slavic languages.
Prof. Ivić continued to publish and be active in the linguistic community long after her retirement.
She will be greatly missed by her students and colleagues throughout the world.
The official obituary of the Serbian Academy can be found at http://www.sanu.ac.rs/Hronika.aspx?arg=50 .
--
Wayles Browne

Draga Zec

Department of Linguistics,
Morrill Hall, Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853, U.S.A.

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