37.1636, Confs: 19th European Conference on Formal Description of Slavic Languages & Satellite Workshop on Information Structure in Slavic Languages (Germany)

Mon May 4 12:05:02 UTC 2026

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-1636. Mon May 04 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.1636, Confs: 19th European Conference on Formal Description of Slavic Languages & Satellite Workshop on Information Structure in Slavic Languages (Germany)

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Date: 30-Apr-2026
From: Olav Mueller-Reichau [reichau at uni-leipzig.de]
Subject: 19th European Conference on Formal Description of Slavic Languages & Satellite Workshop on Information Structure in Slavic Languages

19th European Conference on Formal Description of Slavic Languages &
Satellite Workshop on Information Structure in Slavic Languages
Short Title: FDSL-19

Date: 25-Nov-2026 - 27-Nov-2026
Location: Leipzig, Germany
Contact: Olav Mueller-Reichau
Contact Email: reichau at uni-leipzig.de

Linguistic Field(s): Morphology; Phonology; Pragmatics; Semantics;
Syntax
Language Family(ies): Baltic; Slavic

Submission Deadline: 23-Aug-2026

Formal Description of Slavic Languages (FDSL) is a forum for
researchers and scholars to present their linguistic work and discuss
issues related to the formal description of Slavic languages. It
covers a wide range of disciplines, including phonology, morphology,
syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and also including theoretical,
experimental and corpus approaches. The main goal of FDSL is to
provide a platform for the exchange of linguistic ideas and research
results and to promote the development of formal methods for the
analysis of Slavic languages.
FDSL was first held in Leipzig in 1995 and has since become first a
biennial and then an annual event, with conferences held in different
cities across Europe. The conference series has attracted a growing
number of researchers and has contributed significantly to the
advancement of formal approaches to the study of Slavic languages. For
a summary of the history of FDSL, see Wągiel 2025 (DOI:
10.5817/LB2025-42145).
The 19th European Conference on Formal Description of Slavic Languages
(FDSL-19) will be organized by the Institute of Slavic Studies of the
University of Leipzig from November 25 till November 27 2026 as a
face-to-face event. Besides the main session, there will be a
satellite workshop on Information Structure in Slavic languages
organized by Radek Šimík (see description below).
Invited Speakers:
Olga Borik (Madrid)
Uwe Junghanns (Göttingen)
Bożena Rozwadowska (Wrocław)
Radek Šimík (Prague)
Philipp Weisser (Leipzig)
Invited speaker, workshop:
Artem Novozhilov (Nova Gorica)
For the main session, abstracts are invited for 20-minute
presentations followed by 10-minutes discussions on topics dealing
with formal aspects of Slavic syntax, morphology, phonology,
semantics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, and computational
linguistics.
For the workshop, abstracts are also invited for 20-minute
presentations followed by 10-minutes discussions; issues to address
are given below.
Abstracts, including data and references, should not exceed 2 pages in
length (A4, 2.5cm margins, font size: 12pt., font: Times New Roman and
line spacing 1,15). Submissions, which should not reveal the authors’
identity in any way, are restricted to either one single- and one
co-authored paper, or two co-authored papers, per individual.
Please submit abstracts via Oxford Abstracts,  indicating whether the
abstract is intended for the main session, or for the workshop:
https://app.oxfordabstracts.com/stages/82223/submitter
Notification of acceptance: September 23, 2026
Description of the Workshop 'Information structure in Slavic
languages':
The study of information structure in Slavic linguistics is nearly a
century old (cf. Mathesius 1939). It has continuously attracted the
attention of researchers from a variety of traditions and theoretical
frameworks (Daneš 1957, 1974; Firbas 1971, 1992; Sgall et al. 1973;
Bogusławski 1977; King 1995; Junghanns & Zybatow 1997, 2009; Alter
1997; Hajičová et al. 1998; Slioussar 2007; Kučerová 2007; Titov 2012;
for surveys, see Junghanns & Zybatow 2009 or Jasinskaja 2016).
The notoriously complex notional area of information structure
(involving notions such as new vs. old/given information, topic,
focus, contrast, exhaustification, presupposition, utterance
partition, discourse, context, questions under discussion; see e.g.
Kruijff-Korbayová & Steedman 2003) has recently undergone a decent
level of consolidation, at least in formal approaches to information
structure, thanks to influential works like Rooth (1992) (on focus),
Büring (2003) (on topic), or Krifka (2009) (on information structural
notions more generally). This development has also had an impact on
research on Slavic languages and has enhanced its mutual compatibility
and its potential integration into general linguistic discourse
(Fanselow & Lenertová 2012; Kučerová 2012; Šimík & Wierzba 2017; Ionin
& Luchkina 2018; Velnić 2019; Tomaszewicz in press; a.m.o.). Probably
the best-studied aspect of information structure is its encoding by
word order; indeed, the flexibility of Slavic word order (esp. in
contrast to English) provided the initial impetus for studying
information structure (Mathesius 1907, 1939) and has remained a
dominant area of interest (all above-mentioned references; for a
survey see Titov 2024). The relevance of prosody was clear early on
(e.g. Daneš 1957, Bryzgunova 1980) and the prosodic encoding of
information structure has received systematic attention in the last 30
years or so (Alter 1997; Mehlhorn & Zybatow 2000; Stopar 2017;
Hamlaoui et al. 2019; for a survey see Šimík 2024), including
investigations into how word order and prosody interact or compete in
the encoding of IS (Arnaudova 2001; Šimík & Wierzba 2017). Relatively
less studied, also in a cross-linguistic comparison, are particles
which associate with focus or (contrastive) topic (see e.g. McCoy
2001; Jasinskaja & Zeevat 2008; Tomaszewicz 2013, in press), with the
notable exception of the particle (ė)to, used in monoclausal cleft
constructions in some Slavic languages (Junghanns 1997; Kimmelmann
2009; Tajsner 2018; Burukina & den Dikken 2020; Shipova 2023).
Finally, there is a growing body of research on information structure
in comprehension (Sekerina 1997; Slioussar 2011; Chromý & Vojvodić
2023, Lacina et al. 2023), production (Novozhilov & Slioussar 2025),
L1-acquisition (Mykhaylyk 2012; Smolík 2015; Velnić 2019),
L2-acquisition (Laleko 2022; Luchkina et al. 2024; Slioussar &
Harchevnik 2024), or in heritage languages (Sekerina & Trueswell 2011;
Zerbian et al. 2022; Martynova et al. 2024).
While our understanding of information structure in Slavic languages
has progressed significantly over the past decades, many questions
still remain to be addressed, whether it comes to the object languages
(less studied languages like Sorbian, Belarusian, or Torlak), the type
of phenomena (information structure in non-assertive speech acts,
syntax and semantics of information structure-sensitive particles),
the kind of method used (quantitative approaches, based on
experiments, corpora, computational modelling), the competition and
relations among the variety of factors interacting with information
structure, or information structure in an interdisciplinary setting.
A summary of issues to address:
- information structural notions (focus, topic, givenness, contrast,
etc.) and their subtypes (narrow vs. broad, new vs. contrastive,
etc.)
- their relevance for linguistic description, theory, and modelling
- formal encoding of information structural notions: word order,
prosody, particles, constructions, ellipsis, discourse structuring,
etc.
- the interactions and relations among the formal strategies of IS
encoding
- competition between prosodic and word order-based encoding,
interaction between the use of particles and word order/prosody, etc.
- interface between information structural notions and related notions
such as referentiality, exhaustivity, additivity, implicatures, topic
progression, discourse structuring
- information structure in non-assertive utterance types - questions,
imperatives, fragments, etc. - or in embedded environments
- interface between information structure and neighboring linguistic
disciplines: syntax, semantics, prosody, discourse, and conversational
pragmatics
- information structure in less studied Slavic languages
- cross-Slavic and broader cross-linguistic comparison
- psycho-, neuro-, or sociolinguistic aspects of information structure
information structure in L1- and L2-acquisition
- methods of studying information structure: experiments, corpus
investigations, comparative approaches (cross-Slavic and
cross-linguistic comparisons), theoretical and computational modelling

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