[Lingtyp] CfP for SLE workshop

Mon Nov 9 20:33:05 UTC 2026

Workshop proposal for the
60th annual conference of Societas Linguistica Europaea

We kindly ask you to send provisional abstracts up to 100 words excluding references by November 18, 2026, to:

ilia.afanasev at univie.ac.at<mailto:ilia.afanasev at univie.ac.at>
maximilian.herbert.manfred.gruebsch at uni-jena.de<mailto:maximilian.herbert.manfred.gruebsch at uni-jena.de>

If the workshop is approved, authors will be asked to submit revised 500-word abstracts according to the SLE guidelines.

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Workshop Convenors:
Ilia Afanasev (University of Vienna)
Maximilian Grübsch (Friedrich Schiller University Jena)
Björn Wiemer (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz)

The Emergence and Development of Future-Tense Constructions
in Slavic Languages and elsewhere: Historical and Areal Perspectives

The workshop discusses the emergence of future-tense constructions in premodern (here, denoting the historical period from the 10th to the 17th centuries) European languages, with particular attention to the Slavic languages, while also considering the areal and historical factors that have shaped such constructions in European languages more broadly.
The workshop chooses Slavic languages as its focus due to the combination of chronological depth of their attestation, high degree of microvariation and a long history of interdialectal contact (Wiemer, 2025, 2026). The workshop investigates how Slavic studies may contribute to the typological investigation of future-tense constructions and their emergence (Penkova, 2024). The workshop studies how Slavic languages fit into the broader picture of the linguistic areas they have been a part of, as well as how they contribute to the typology of the future tense emergence in general, and how they may provide insights into general laws of language change (Górski & Eder, 2023; Nijs & Van de Velde, 2026). The workshop papers are going to employ a wide range of methods that encompass both quantitative and qualitative, formal and functional approaches. Interdisciplinary approaches that include a wider range of languages are of special interest.
The historical data of Slavic languages provides a roughly thousand-year record encompassing diverse genres and both more formal and more vernacular varieties of written language. Although this time span may appear relatively short compared with that of some other European languages, it is precisely in this period that the tense–aspect systems of Slavic languages witnessed substantial changes (Bermel, 1997; Dickey, 2015; Eckhoff & Janda, 2014; Mayo, 1985; Moser, 1998; Nikiforov, 1952; Silina, 1983; Wiemer & Seržant, 2017). This makes the study of Slavic languages especially interesting, as one may not just infer, but actually study the reassembling of the system from the data (Andersen, 2006c; Moser, 1998; Penkova, 2019). Most Slavic languages underwent a series of developments that transformed the older systems attested in the earliest manuscripts (Andersen, 2006a; Eckhoff & Haug, 2015; Eckhoff & Janda, 2014), resulting in several distinct configurations which survive in modern varieties (Mirić, n.d.).
One of the key developments was the emergence of grammaticalized constructions expressing future time reference, particularly those involving modal and other lexical verbs, while earlier systems exhibit a wide range of modal and existential constructions (Andersen, 2006b, 2006c; Mayo, 1985; Nikiforov, 1952; Penkova, 2019). Modern Slavic languages, however, display a diverse but generally more conventionalized set of future constructions, with language-specific patterns and some continuing variation within individual languages (Benić, 2024; Mirić, n.d.; Wiemer, 2026).
This leads to the following research questions, which the talks presented at the workshop aim to address:

  *   How did the grammaticalization of future constructions interact with the development of grammatical aspect? In which respect are the modern present perfective forms, such as Belarusian зраблю ‘(I) will do (something)’ connected to or distinguished from the modern future tense forms, such as in Belarusian, either рабіцьму ‘(I) will do (something)’ or буду рабіць ‘id.’?
  *   How do developments in Slavic compare with attested pathways of future-tense grammaticalization in other languages? What can the history of future-tense constructions in the Slavic languages contribute to the overall typology of futurity, particularly in relation to European areal patterns associated with Standard Average European?
  *   Is it possible to trace the role of language contact in the emergence of new Slavic tense-aspect systems? If so, how?
  *   What evidence is there for areal convergence or divergence among Slavic languages themselves? Which divisions can be observed?
  *   Are there indications of broader areal processes comparable to the Präteritumschwund, either within Slavic or involving contact with non-Slavic languages? What role did contact within areal groupings such as the Balkan Sprachbund play in these developments?
  *   How can the emergence of future constructions from modal expressions be traced in low-resource diachronic corpora characterized by substantial variation, such as those containing Old Novgorodian texts?
  *   How might the genres represented in historical manuscripts have affected the attestation of constructions that subsequently developed into markers of future time reference?
  *   To what extent can earlier systems be reconstructed for languages for which written evidence from the relevant period is lacking?
  *   Is it possible to identify the factors that condition intra-language variation in future constructions through the understanding of broader historical processes?

The workshop will primarily consider sources from the Slavic-speaking territories of the Byzantine Empire, the medieval Bulgarian states, the Kingdom of Poland, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Kyivan Rus’, the Novgorod Republic, and the Principality of Moscow (later the Tsardom of Russia), dating from the 10th to the end of the 17th century CE. The varieties represented include Old Church Slavonic (also known as Old Bulgarian), its later Church Slavonic recensions, Middle Bulgarian, Old Novgorodian, Old East Slavic, Middle Russian, Ruthenian (Middle Ukrainian/Middle Belarusian), Old and Middle Czech, and Old and Middle Polish.
At the same time, the workshop welcomes contributions drawing on modern dialects and on languages that have been in contact with Slavic varieties over the centuries, particularly Greek, Baltic, Germanic, Romance, and Uralic languages. Special attention will be paid to Byzantine Greek and Latin, in which many of the source texts for early Slavic translations were written. This broad selection should provide a more comprehensive account of how future-tense constructions emerged and developed in the Slavic languages. This, in turn, will contribute to our understanding of how future time reference became grammatically encoded in European languages more generally.
The workshop welcomes a wide range of approaches, from dialectometry and the comparative method to corpus-driven, usage-based analyses and contrastive linguistics. Given the scarcity and uneven distribution of historical evidence, one of the challenges that the workshop talks will address is how these limitations affect linguistic analysis. The workshop is particularly interested in approaches that combine datasets and/or methods to provide the most robust and balanced account of the available evidence.

References
Andersen, H. L. (2006a). Future and Future Perfect in the Old Novgorod Dialect. Russian Linguistics, 30, 1–18. <https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?HfMr4F>
Andersen, H. L. (2006b). Periphrastic Futures in Slavic. Divergence and Convergence. In K. Eksell & T. Vinther (Eds), Change in Verbal Systems. Issues in Explanation (pp. 9–45). Peter Lang. <https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?HfMr4F>
Andersen, H. L. (2006c). The Last Days of the Russian Future Perfect. In H. L. Andersen, M. Birkelund, & M.-B. M. Hansen (Eds), La linguistique au coeur. Valence verbale, grammaticalisation et corpus. Mélanges offerts à Lene Schøsler à l’occasion de son 60e anniversaire (pp. 149–160). University Press of Southern Denmark. <https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?HfMr4F>
Benić, M. (2024). Contemporary Croatian Future II: A Tense or a Mood? Zeitschrift Für Slawistik, 69(2), 273–302. https://doi.org/10.1515/slaw-2024-0015 <https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?HfMr4F>
Bermel, N. (1997). Context and the Lexicon in the Development of Russian Aspect. University of California Press. <https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?HfMr4F>
Dickey, S. M. (2015). Parameters of Slavic Aspect Reconsidered: The East-West Aspect Division from a Diachronic Perspective. In Studies in Accentology and Slavic Linguistics in Honor of Ronald F. Feldstein (pp. 29–45). <https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?HfMr4F>
Eckhoff, H. M., & Haug, D. (2015). Aspect and prefixation in Old Church Slavonic. Diachronica, 32(2), 186–230. <https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?HfMr4F>
Eckhoff, H. M., & Janda, L. A. (2014). Grammatical Profiles and Aspect in Old Church Slavonic. Transactions of the Philological Society, 112(2), 231–258. <https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?HfMr4F>
Górski, R. L., & Eder, M. (2023). Modelling the Dynamics of Language Change: Logistic Regression, Piotrowski’s Law, and a Handful of Examples in Polish. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, 30(1), 125–151. https://doi.org/10.1080/09296174.2022.2151208 <https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?HfMr4F>
Mayo, P. J. (1985). The Morphology of Aspect in Seventeenth-Century Russian. Slavica Publishers. <https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?HfMr4F>
Mirić, M. (n.d.). Future Tense Constructions. Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/2589-6229_ESLO_COM_038494 <https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?HfMr4F>
Moser, M. (1998). Die polnische, ukrainische und weißrussische Interferenzschicht im russischen Satzbau des 16. Und 17. Jahrhunderts. Lang. <https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?HfMr4F>
Nijs, J., & Van de Velde, F. (2026). Testing the performance of S-curves for language change. Diachronica, 43(2), 189–223. https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.23065.nij <https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?HfMr4F>
Nikiforov, S. D. (1952). Glagol, ego kategorii i formy v russkoj pis’mennosti vtoroj poloviny XVI veka [The Verb, Its Categories and Forms in Russian Writing of the Second Half of the 16th Century]. Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR. <https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?HfMr4F>
Penkova, J. A. (2019). Imu, uch’nu, stanu, budu: Korpusnoe issledovanie perifraz budushchego vremeni v srednerusskoj pis’mennosti [Imu, uch’nu, stanu, budu: A Corpus Study of Future Tense Periphrases in Middle Russian Writing]. Slavistična Revija, 67(4), 569–586. <https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?HfMr4F>
Penkova, J. A. (2024). Slavjanskoe predbudushchee v tipologicheskoj perspektive [The Slavic Future Perfect in Typological Perspective]. Institut russkogo jazyka im. V. V. Vinogradova RAN. https://doi.org/10.31912/slavyanskoe_predbudushchee-2024 <https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?HfMr4F>
Silina, W. B. (1983). Istoriia kategorii glagol’nogo vida [History of the Category of Verbal Aspect]. In Istoricheskaia grammatika russkogo iazyka [Historical Grammar of the Russian Language] (pp. 158–279). Nauka. <https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?HfMr4F>
Wiemer, B. (2025). Unity behind Diversity: What Explains the Distribution of Perfective Present in Slavic Languages? In S. Dekker, E. Fortuin, & J. Kamphuis (Eds), The Slavic Verb, vol. I: Comparative, Diachronic and Typological Perspectives (Vol. 48, pp. 286–348). Brill. <https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?HfMr4F>
Wiemer, B. (2026). The entanglement of grammaticalization and hypoanalysis in the rise of futures in Slavic languages. In Futures of the past (pp. 209–264). Language Science Press. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20541858 <https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?HfMr4F>
Wiemer, B., & Seržant, I. A. (2017). Diachrony and Typology of Slavic Aspect: What Does Morphology Tell Us? In Unity and Diversity in Grammaticalization Scenarios (pp. 239–307). Language Science Press. <https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?HfMr4F>

Dr. Björn Wiemer
Professor of Slavic linguistics, member of Academia Europaea
Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
Institut für Slavistik, Turkologie und zirkumbaltische Studien (ISTziB)
Jakob-Welder-Weg 18
D- 55099 Mainz
tel. +49 / 6131 / 39 -22186
Sekr. +49 / 6131 / 39 -28446
https://www.slavistik.uni-mainz.de/univ-prof-bjoern-wiemer/
https://uni-mainz.academia.edu/Bj%C3%B6rnWiemer
https://www.ae-info.org/ae/Member/Wiemer_Bj%C3%B6rn

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