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

• 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)