Academician Milorad Radovanović passed away

It is with great sadness that the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts informs the public of the passing of its full member and vice-president of the SASA Branch in Novi Sad Professor Milorad Radovanović on 10 June 2020. He was one of the most influential Serbian linguists, who greatly contributed to the study of sociolinguistics, fuzzy linguistics, syntax and semantics as well as language planning,

Academician Milorad Radovanović was born on 4 September 1947 in Belgrade. He graduated in 1970 from the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad, received his master’s degree two years later at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade, and defended his PhD thesis in the field of syntax and semantics at the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad (1976).  He specialized in Semiotics at the University of South Florida and the Summer Institute of Linguistics of the Linguistic Society of America, Tampa, Florida, USA (1975).

He was a full professor of General Linguistics at the Faculty of Philosophy, the University of Novi Sad from 1986 to 2015 when he retired. As a visiting professor, he taught at European and American universities and in Japan, and he was an invited speaker in numerous international scientific conferences around the world.

He was elected a corresponding member of SASA in 2003, and a full member in 2012. In addition to being a vice president of the SASA Branch in Novi Sad, Academician Radovanović was a member and president of the SASA Board for the Contemporary Serbian Language in the Light of New Linguistic Theories

He was a member of the Linguistic Society of America, Societas Linguistica Europaea and the Commission for Sociolinguistics of the International Committee of Slavists. Academician Radovanović made a major contribution as a member of the editorial board of Matica Srpska Journal of Philology and Linguistics, SASA Branch in Novi Sad Annals and Linguistics Abstracts (Oxford), as well as the president of the editorial board of the library ‘Studije o Srbima’. He is the editor of Celokupna dela Pavla Ivića [Collected Works of Pavle Ivić], author of the following publications: Imenica u funkciji kondenzatora [Nouns as Condensers] (Novi Sad, 1978); Sociolingvistika [Sociolinguistics] (Belgrade, 1979, Novi Sad, 1986, 2003); Spisi iz sintakse i semantike [Records in Syntax and Semantics] (Novi Sad, 1990); Spisi iz kontekstualne lingvistike [Contextual Linguistics Records] (Novi Sad, 1997); Planiranje jezika [Language Planning] (Novi Sad, 2004); Stari i novi spisi: Ogledi o jeziku i umu [Old and New Records: Samples of Language and Mind] (Novi Sad, 2007), Uvod u fazi lingvistiku [Introduction to Fuzzy Linguistics] (Novi Sad, 2009), Fazi lingvistika [Fuzzy Linguistics] (Novi Sad, 2015).

Not only does the passing of Milorad Radovanović represent a loss to the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts but the entire Serbian philology.