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The aim of this workshop is to gather scholars working on linguistic and textual phenomena involving the concepts FIRE or WATER or both of them in interaction (FIRE and WATER, FIRE vs. WATER, FIRE in WATER, etc.), in one or more Indo-European languages and traditions.
We welcome presentations that systematically combine formal analysis with a methodical functional analysis of the phenomenon’s semantics and (linguistic and extralinguistic) context. The following are some examples of what may be meant here by formal and functional analysis:
A: Formal analysis
Etymologies of specific lexical items.
Word formation processes.
Syntactic patterns.
Formulaic language and lexical collocations
B: Functional analysis
Semantic collocations
Poetic/traditional/mythological themes
Semantic roles and frame semantics, or other cognitive-linguistic approaches to meaning, such as Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Image Schemata.
Pragmatic and discourse functions
Correspondences between linguistic/textual phenomena and archaeological findings/material
culture.
This list is not exhaustive and is intended only to provide illustrative examples. Other topics or approaches dealing with fire and/or water are also welcome, provided that they combine a formal and a funcitonal side into their analysis, be it synchronic or diachronic.
Presentations will last 30 minutes (20 minutes +10 minutes Q&A). They may address either the historical linguistics of a single Indo-European language or the comparative analysis of multiple languages and may focus on either synchrony or diachrony.
We hope that you will join us! Please send your abstract (max. 600 words + references) to fire.water.indoeuropean@gmail.com by September 15, 2026.
Please send any inquiry to fire.water.indoeuropean@gmail.com
April 16 and 17, 2026
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.
September 19 and 20, 2025
The symposium aims to bring to the fore the most pressing and engaging problems in comparative Germanic linguistics within a variety of research domains, including but not limited to linguistic reconstruction, runology, poetics, and phylogeny.
Invited speakers
Invited speakers
The origins of Germanic from the perspective of Prehistoric Archaeology (Volker Heyd — University of Helsinki)
Old methods, new insights: Gothic nominal inflection and relative chronology (Ronald I. Kim — Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań)
The Importance of the Poetic Record to Germanic Language History (Mikael Males — University of Oslo)
Ein ererbter Archaismus im Germanischen: Das hypostatische Suffix urgerm. *-ba- (Sergio Neri — University of Basel)
Pre- and Proto-Germanic obstruent phonology (Joseph Salmons — University of Wisconsin–Madison)
The periodization of Northwest Germanic anew (Michael Schulte — University of Agder)
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