36.3356, Confs: Rencontres Autour de la Linguistique Formelle 9 (France)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-3356. Mon Nov 03 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.3356, Confs: Rencontres Autour de la Linguistique Formelle 9 (France)

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Date: 02-Nov-2025
From: Daniel Harbour [daniel.harbour at cnrs.fr]
Subject: Rencontres Autour de la Linguistique Formelle 9


Rencontres Autour de la Linguistique Formelle 9
Short Title: RALFe 2026

Date: 03-Jun-2026 - 05-Jun-2026
Location: Paris, France
Contact: Daniel Harbour
Contact Email: ralfeparis26 at gmail.com
Meeting URL: https://sites.google.com/view/ralfe2026

Linguistic Field(s): Linguistic Theories; Morphology; Phonology;
Semantics; Syntax

Submission Deadline: 31-Jan-2026

RALFe 2026, the ninth edition of Rencontres autour de la linguistique
formelle, France’s premier annual conference for formal linguistics,
will take place at Université Paris Cité on June 3 2026 and Université
Paris 8 on June 4–5 2026. Paris Cité’s Laboratoire de linguistique
formelle (LLF) will host a one-day workshop entitled ‘Allomorphy
across grammar’. Paris 8’s Structures formelles du langage (SFL) will
host the main conference.
Our invited speakers are:
 - Colin Phillips (University of Maryland, University of Oxford –
conference)
 - Anamaria Fălăuş (CNRS, Université Nantes – conference)
 - Richard Kayne (New York University – conference)
 - Marijke de Belder (Utrecht University – workshop)
 - Markéta Ziková (Masarykova Univerzita – conference)
We invite abstract submissions for workshop talks, conference talks,
and conference posters. Submissions may explore any area of
theoretical linguistics including morphology, phonetics, phonology,
pragmatics, semantics, and syntax. We are catholic as to empirical
domain (acquisition, underdocumented languages, sign languages, …),
framework, and methods.
Talk slots will be 30 minutes including questions. Abstracts should be
anonymous and no longer than two A4 pages (including data and key
references) at 12pt, sensible font, reasonable margins. You may make
at most two submissions (maximally one of them sole-authored) across
the three days.
Important Dates:
 - Abstract submission – 31 January 2026
 - Notification of outcome – 10 March 2026
For conference enquiries, contact Caterina Donati or Daniel Harbour.
For workshop enquiries, contact Karen de Clercq or Noam Faust. The
email address is <ralfeparis26 at gmail.com>. The conference website,
currently under construction, is
https://sites.google.com/view/ralfe2026.
Workshop prospectus – Allomorphy across Grammar
This workshop investigates the processes underlying allomorphy, where
multiple forms express the same morphosyntactic information or lexical
information (Paster 2014). Allomorphy sits at the intersection of
phonology, morphology, and syntax, and is a testing ground for
theories of locality, realization, and optimization. The workshop aims
to clarify the mechanisms that govern allomorph selection and its
limits.
Themes and Questions:
 - Suppletion and its boundaries – Suppletion is one obvious case of
allomorphy. The workshop wants to address the difference between weak
suppletion (forms with some phonological resemblance) and strong
suppletion (forms with no such resemblance). Is there a formal
difference between them, or are they points on a continuum? If one
assumes morpheme-specific phonology (Pater 2007), what are the formal
limits that distinguish phonology-driven alternations from suppletion?
 - Locality and morphosyntactic constraints – The selection of
allomorphs is constrained by locality, but different approaches appeal
to different locality domains: morphemes may condition each other’s
form only if they belong to the same structural span (Abels & Muriungi
2008; Svenonius 2016), phase (Moskal 2015; Choi & Harley 2019), or
constituent (Caha et al. 2019), or if no overt intervening node
(Embick 2010; Calabrese 2015) or any other node blocks the relation
(Bobaljik 2012; Embick 2003). What do these varying domains of
locality reveal, and can they be unified, or do different data sets
truly require distinct locality restrictions?
 - Non-Realization and Identity Avoidance – Allomorphy sometimes
involves non-realization (Trommer 2012): is absence simply another
allomorph, and how should this be represented formally? Relatedly,
identity avoidance (Nevins 2012; Faust 2023) raises the question of
how realizational systems block “too similar” exponents—whether in
phonological or featural terms—and what this implies for paradigmatic
organization.
 - (Optimizing) Phonologically Conditioned Allomorphy – Phonologically
Conditioned allomorphy (PCA) arises when form selection depends on
phonological context. A central question is whether all PCA can be
considered optimizing PCA (OPCA)—that is, whether the alternation
improves phonological well-formedness (Nevins 2011; De Belder 2020).
What phonological features can or cannot trigger PCA/OPCA, and how are
such triggers encoded in phonological theory?
 - Syncretism and the Limits of Exponent Variation – Syncretism—the
use of one exponent across different morphosyntactic contexts—raises
complementary questions to allomorphy. Why do some contexts resist
differentiation, and how is syncretism formally represented (Bobaljik
2002; Starke 2009; Baunaz & Lander 2018)? Is syncretism best explained
as an economy-driven collapse of forms (Baerman et al. 2005; Müller
2007), or as a lexicalisation strategy (as for instance via
underspecification in DM; Harley & Noyer 1999) and overspecification
in nanosyntax (Caha 2009)?



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