The Slavic Department of the University of Leipzig is pleased to announce the 7th European Conference on Formal Description of Slavic Languages (FDSL-7).

Abstracts are invited for 30-minute talks (20-minute presentation plus 10 minutes for discussion) on Slavic syntax, morphology, phonology, semantics, psycholinguistics and computational linguistics. Presentations will be in any Slavic language, English or German. There will also be a Workshop on the Phonology of Slavic Languages organized by Tobias Scheer.

Deadline for receipt of abstracts is 15 June, 2007.

HOW TO SUBMIT ABSTRACTS

Abstracts must be anonymous and no longer than one page (margins: 2.5 cm or 1 inch, size of characters: 12 points, spacing: single). An additional page for references, figures and data can be also included.

The abstract must be submitted as a PDF attachment. Please make sure that all fonts are embedded. If you have no access to a pdf maker such as Acrobat Distiller, you might consider installing the free office suite OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org/), which includes a regular pdf output.

Abstracts must be submitted to fdsl7@uni-leipzig.de by June 15, 2007.

Include the following information in the body of the e-mail message:

(1) title of paper;
(2) your name;
(3) email address;
(4) affiliation.

An individual may submit at most one single and one co-authored paper.

REVIEWING PROCEDURE

The abstracts will be anonymously reviewed by external referees. Preference will be given to presentations not duplicated at other major conferences.

Authors will be notified by *July, 6* whether their abstract was accepted.

PUBLICATION OF CONFERENCE PAPERS

As usual papers will be published. Written versions must be submitted by March 31, 2008. Publication Guidelines with detailed information will be made available on the Conference Homepage in due time.
Papers submitted for publication will be reviewed. Only those submissions that are recommended by the reviewers will be included in the volume.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Gerhild Zybatow, Uwe Junghanns, Denisa Lenertová, Dorothee Fehrmann, Petr Biskup

CONFERENCE EMAIL

fdsl7@uni-leipzig.de

WORKSHOP ON THE PHONOLOGY OF SLAVIC LANGUAGES

Previous editions of FDSL have shown that the "spontaneous" potential of (Europe-based) phonologists working on Slavic languages pains at constituting a critical mass for fruitful exchange that is also able to attract a specialized audience. The organizers of this year's venue wish to counter-act this natural tendency by voluntary action. The goal of the workshop is thus to set up a programme that discusses questions which are at the forefront of theoretical discussion from the perspective of the Slavic record. Possible broad topics include (but are not limited to):

• the contribution of the rich system of melodic processes in Slavic (e.g. palatalizations) to the renewed interest in melodic theory (the last decade has led to an impoverishment of feature geometry: the systems used look more and more like unorganized SPE-type labels, underspecification is not a central point of interest anymore etc.)
• interface with morphology (and syntax): phonological consequences of the rich overt morphological system of Slavic languages (from the perspective of Distributed Morphology or more traditional views of the interface such as Prosodic Phonology). Phase theory from the phonological point of view: phonological motivation for phases, (non-)coincidence with morpho-syntactically motivated phases
• the contribution of representations (as opposed to computation/ constraints) to the definition of grammaticality. The role and (restricted?) generative power of GEN
• the too-many-solutions problem of OT
• the grounded issue (or substance abuse): how much of the behaviour of sound, and which part exactly, is due to self-contained phonological properties that owe nothing to the extra-neuronal world, how much is but the consequence of external constraints on speech such as phonetics, teleological perspectives, lexical access, pragmatics etc.?
• older varieties of Slavic are supposed to have accommodated a rich intonational and tonal system, which on the classical account is related to various modern reflexes: stress (Eastern Slavic), tone and length (South Slavic), length (Western Slavic). In which way do modern theories and comparable data from non-Slavic languages relate to this classical record: is the philological scenario plausible? Or are the alleged modern reflexes independent developments?