37.3603, Confs: Workshop at SLE 2027 – The Emergence and Development of Future-Tense Constructions in Slavic Languages: Historical and Areal Perspectives (Slovakia)

Tue Nov 3 15:05:02 UTC 2026

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-3603. Tue 03 Nov 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.3603, Confs: Workshop at SLE 2027 – The Emergence and Development of Future-Tense Constructions in Slavic Languages: Historical and Areal Perspectives (Slovakia)

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Date: 01-Nov-2026
From: Ilia Afanasev [ilia.afanasev at univie.ac.at]
Subject: Workshop at SLE 2027 – The Emergence and Development of Future-Tense Constructions in Slavic Languages: Historical and Areal Perspectives

Workshop at SLE 2027 – The Emergence and Development of Future-Tense
Constructions in Slavic Languages: Historical and Areal Perspectives

Date: 25-Aug-2027 - 28-Aug-2027
Location: Košice, Slovakia
Contact: Ilia Afanasev
Contact Email: ilia.afanasev at univie.ac.at

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Historical Linguistics;
Typology
Language Family(ies): Slavic (slav1255)

Submission Deadline: 15-Nov-2026

Call: We kindly ask you to send provisional abstracts up to 100 words
excluding references by November 15, 2026, to:
ilia.afanasev at univie.ac.at
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.
Workshop Convenors:
Ilia Afanasev (University of Vienna)
Bjorn Wiemer (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz)
Maximilian Grübsch (Friedrich Schiller University Jena)
Workshop Description:
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 zrabliu ‘(I) will
have done (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.

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