Topic: Read to children and with children not to leave them speechless: The intellectual vocabulary of young people
Anita Peti-Stantić was born in Virovitica, and finished primary and secondary school in Zagreb where she enrolled at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in 1985 studying in the South Slavic study programme as a single major (today: the Department of Croatian studies) and at the same time she studied classical philology as a double major. She graduated in 1989 with a thesis paper Ironija u dramaturgiji Antuna Šoljana (“Irony in Drama Work by Antun Šoljan“). She received her master’s degree from Yale University, and pursued her postgraduate studies further at the University of Vienna under the supervision of the academic Radoslav Katičić. She received her PhD in 2002 with the topic Comparative Syntax of Personal Pronouns in South Slavic Languages under the supervision of professor Ivo Pranjković.
As a full professor and a head of the Department of South Slavic languages and literatures at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, she teaches South Slavic Languages and Literatures. She publishes scientific papers in scholarly journals both home and abroad, and has participated in a number of academic conferences at home and abroad, also giving a few invited lectures at foreign universities, both European and American. Since 2006 she has been leading a scientific project entitled Croatian and Closely Related Cultural and Linguistic Communities. In addition to scientific monographs on the history of standardization processes in South Slavic languages and contemporary sociolinguistics, she is the author of the Great Slovene-Croatian and Croatian-Slovene Dictionary (2014) and a translator from Slovene and English. In collaboration with Vladimira Velički, she wrote the handbook Jezične igre za male i velike (Language Games for children and adults).
She spent two academic years at the Centre for Cognitive Studies of the Tufts University in the USA.
Besides the topics in sociolinguistics, her research interests are currently focused on cognitive linguistics, especially information structure of the sentence in particular, as well as on changes in interrelationships of the grammatical complexity. In addition, she studies the linguistic status of patients suffering from aphasia disorders, and the grammar of heritage speakers. In addition, she is one of the editors of a large multi-year project Enciklopedije slavenskih jezika i lingvistike (Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages and Linguistics). She is the author of two books.