Call for papers

The 26th Workshop on the Roots of Pragmasemantics, held on the top of the Szrenica mountain in the Giant Mountains on the border of Poland and the Czech Republic, invites linguists, logicians, philosophers, psychologists, and researchers from related fields to submit papers for presentation on February 20–23, 2026. This year’s special theme is Event Cognition.

Invited speakers:

• David Beaver (The University of Texas at Austin)

• Oliver Bott (Bielefeld University)

• Marcin Wągiel (Masaryk University) (unconfirmed)

• Eva Wittenberg (Central European University) (unconfirmed)

Submissions on topics related to the special theme or any of the traditional themes of the Szklarska Poreba Workshop are welcome. Experimental and theoretical approaches are both encouraged. We especially welcome innovative ideas, even if they are still in need of further refinement, and submissions from students with no prior experience presenting at international workshops.

Traditional themes of the Szklarska Poreba Workshop include:

• Coordination on meaning

• Inference in natural language

• Experimental semantics and pragmatics

• Bayesian models of interpretation

• Quantum cognition and language

• Grammaticalization and other approaches to diachrony

• Language typology and semantics/pragmatics

• Game-theoretical pragmatics

• Formal models of language acquisition

• Explicature and implicature

• The architecture of the syntax/semantics interface

• Licensing of polarity elements, quantification, etc.

• The evolution of communication and language

• Optimality theory

Submission instructions

Authors are invited to submit blind abstracts (in PDF format) to szklarskaworkshop26@gmail.com. Abstracts should be no longer than one A4 page, including references, with 2.5cm margins and 11pt font. If this is your first presentation outside of your home institution, please indicate this in your cover email. The deadline for abstracts ist December 15, 2025. Acceptance decisions will be communicated by mid-January 2026.

There will be a discussion on the roots of pragmasemantics. If you want to help with a position statement, contact henk.zeevat@uva.nl.