Janez Orešnik

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Prof. Dr. Janez Orešnik (1935-) was born on December 12, 1935 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He finished his undergraduate studies in comparative linguistics of Indo-European languages at the University of Ljubljana in 1958, and completed his Ph.D. in Germanic Linguistics at the same institution in 1965. He continued with post-doctoral studies at the University of Copenhagen (1959 - 1961), University of Zagreb (1962 - 1963), University of Reykjavik (1965 - 1966) and Harvard University (1969 - 1970).

Prof. Dr. Orešnik is an internationally recognized specialist for comparative linguistics. He was also the Chair of the Department for Comparative and General Linguistics at the University of Ljubljana between 1990 and 2004. He is a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Until 1990 Dr. Orešnik had concentrated on Germanic comparative linguistics and on Scandinavian languages, esp. Icelandic language. He formulated and partly substantiated some phonological rules of Icelandic. He described several non-standard phenomena of Icelandic phonology, esp. within the preterite subjunctive and the imperative. His main publication of the period is the "Studies in the phonology and morphology of Icelandic" printed in 1985. The volume was granted the Slovenian Boris Kidrič Foundation award in 1987. Since 1985 Dr. Orešnik, together with a team of younger colleagues, has been developing, within Natural Linguistics, the theory about strong and weak variants in syntax, i.e. about synonymous syntactic units that compete with each other in the history of the language. The team formulated hypotheses about the direction of the competition and was checking the hypotheses in language material. The group arranged two international conferences about Natural Linguistics (including the theory of strong and weak variants) at the University of Maribor, Slovenia, in 1993 and 1996. The theory is sometimes called the Slovenian model of Natural Syntax in international surroundings. After 1999 Dr. Orešnik abandoned the notion of strong and weak variants, calling them (morpho)syntactic variants instead. He issued two volumes on this framework: "A predictable aspect of (morpho)syntactic variants" in 2001, and "Naturalness in (morpho)syntax: English examples" in 2004.