RALFe 2026, the ninth edition of Rencontres autour de la linguistique formelle, France’s premier annual conference for formal linguistics, will take place at Université Paris Cité on June 3 2026 and Université Paris 8 on June 4–5 2026. Paris Cité’s Laboratoire de linguistique formelle (LLF) will host a one-day workshop entitled ‘Allomorphy across grammar’. Paris 8’s Structures formelles du langage (SFL) will host the main conference.

Our invited speakers are:
- Colin Phillips (University of Maryland, University of Oxford – conference)
- Anamaria Fălăuş (CNRS, Université Nantes – conference)
- Richard Kayne (New York University – conference)
- Marijke de Belder (Utrecht University – workshop)
- Markéta Ziková (Masarykova Univerzita – conference)

We invite abstract submissions for workshop talks, conference talks, and conference posters. Submissions may explore any area of theoretical linguistics including morphology, phonetics, phonology, pragmatics, semantics, and syntax. We are catholic as to empirical domain (acquisition, underdocumented languages, sign languages, …), framework, and methods.

Talk slots will be 30 minutes including questions. Abstracts (in English or French) should be anonymous and no longer than two A4 pages (including data and key references) at 12pt, sensible font, reasonable margins. You may make at most two submissions (maximally one of them sole-authored) across the three days.

Important Dates:
- Extended abstract submission – 10 February 2026
- Notification of outcome – 10 March 2026

For conference enquiries, contact Caterina Donati or Daniel Harbour. For workshop enquiries, contact Karen de Clercq or Noam Faust. The email address is <ralfeparis26@gmail.com>.

Workshop prospectus – Allomorphy across Grammar

This workshop investigates the processes underlying allomorphy, where multiple forms express the same morphosyntactic information or lexical information (Paster 2014). Allomorphy sits at the intersection of phonology, morphology, and syntax, and is a testing ground for theories of locality, realization, and optimization. The workshop aims to clarify the mechanisms that govern allomorph selection and its limits.

Themes and Questions:
- Suppletion and its boundaries – Suppletion is one obvious case of allomorphy. The workshop wants to address the difference between weak suppletion (forms with some phonological resemblance) and strong suppletion (forms with no such resemblance). Is there a formal difference between them, or are they points on a continuum? If one assumes morpheme-specific phonology (Pater 2007), what are the formal limits that distinguish phonology-driven alternations from suppletion?

- Locality and morphosyntactic constraints – The selection of allomorphs is constrained by locality, but different approaches appeal to different locality domains: morphemes may condition each other’s form only if they belong to the same structural span (Abels & Muriungi 2008; Svenonius 2016), phase (Moskal 2015; Choi & Harley 2019), or constituent (Caha et al. 2019), or if no overt intervening node (Embick 2010; Calabrese 2015) or any other node blocks the relation (Bobaljik 2012; Embick 2003). What do these varying domains of locality reveal, and can they be unified, or do different data sets truly require distinct locality restrictions?

- Non-Realization and Identity Avoidance – Allomorphy sometimes involves non-realization (Trommer 2012): is absence simply another allomorph, and how should this be represented formally? Relatedly, identity avoidance (Nevins 2012; Faust 2023) raises the question of how realizational systems block “too similar” exponents—whether in phonological or featural terms—and what this implies for paradigmatic organization.

- (Optimizing) Phonologically Conditioned Allomorphy – Phonologically Conditioned allomorphy (PCA) arises when form selection depends on phonological context. A central question is whether all PCA can be considered optimizing PCA (OPCA)—that is, whether the alternation improves phonological well-formedness (Nevins 2011; De Belder 2020). What phonological features can or cannot trigger PCA/OPCA, and how are such triggers encoded in phonological theory?

- Syncretism and the Limits of Exponent Variation – Syncretism—the use of one exponent across different morphosyntactic contexts—raises complementary questions to allomorphy. Why do some contexts resist differentiation, and how is syncretism formally represented (Bobaljik 2002; Starke 2009; Baunaz & Lander 2018)? Is syncretism best explained as an economy-driven collapse of forms (Baerman et al. 2005; Müller 2007), or as a lexicalisation strategy (as for instance via underspecification in DM; Harley & Noyer 1999) and overspecification in nanosyntax (Caha 2009)?