As part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie funded project Verb valency in Germanic: diachronic analysis and reconstruction of protolinguistic scenario (VALGER, project no. 101150253) the research group Linguistics in Pavia, sponsored by the journal North-Western European Language Evolution (NOWELE, John Benjamins), is organizing a two-day symposium dedicated to the study of Germanic syntax.

The symposium will take place at the University of Pavia on Thursday 16 and Friday 17 April 2026.

We invite abstracts that address any topic relevant to the study of syntax in Germanic, with a particular focus on diachronic and/or comparative analyses of syntactic phenomena.

We welcome proposals from any theoretical perspective and particularly encourage junior researchers such as ABD doctoral students (or anyway well into their doctoral research) or researchers at the postdoctoral level to submit abstracts.

The symposium should be considered an opportunity for open discussions aiming to advance the discipline.
Ideally, papers should address a topic of interest either exclusively within the Germanic language family or comparatively across multiple language families (e.g. typologically).

Nevertheless, the focus of the proposed papers should be centered on one or more Germanic varieties and hence aim at a better understanding of the selected syntactic phenomena in Germanic.
Papers will be 20 minutes + 10 minutes for discussion in English or German. Abstracts will be accepted in English or German. No poster session is scheduled.

A special thematic issue of the journal, with selected double-blind peer-reviewed papers from the symposium, is planned for 2027. More details about this will be disclosed in due time.
Your abstract should be one A4 page, single-spaced, with 2.5 cm margins and 12-point font, formatted as a PDF file. A second page with data and figures and a third page with references are allowed.

Please send your abstract and any inquiry to matteo.tarsi@unipv.it
The deadline for submission is Thursday 8 January 2026 at 08:00 Central European Time.

The abstract (PDF file) should be anonymized. Please provide author names and affiliations in the body of the e-mail upon submission.
Authors may submit only one abstract as first author but can also be listed as a co-author on one additional abstract.