Full Title: REEDS Workshop on Multidisciplinary Approaches to Morphosyntactic Variation
Short Title: REEDS MUMOVA2025
Theme: Syntactic variation from a multidisciplinary perspective

Date: 11-Dec-2025 - 12-Dec-2025
Location: Leuven, Belgium

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics; Computational Linguistics; Semantics; Sociolinguistics; Syntax

Call Deadline: 15-Aug-2025

The study of dialectal variation in phonology, morphology, and syntax has received increasing attention in recent decades. The result is an important body of work on dialect syntax with diverse approaches, methodologies, and scopes, including formal approaches (e.g. Bayer 1984, Haegeman 1992, Hoekstra 1993, Poletto 2000, Benincà and Poletto 2004, Van Craenenbroeck 2010), computational-quantitative analyses (e.g. Nerbonne 2009, 2010, Heeringa and Nerbonne 2013, Wieling and Nerbonne 2015), and sociolinguistic investigations (e.g. Ghyselen et al. 2016, Cheshire et al. 2005, Van Hoof and Vandekerckhove 2013, Ghyselen and De Vogelaer 2018). However, despite such progress, interdisciplinary collaboration–both among these subfields and between dialect syntax and other fields–has been surprisingly limited (Cornips 2015, Hinskens 2017).

This is particularly striking given that linguistics, perhaps more than any other field, offers a unique opportunity for interdisciplinary work. It bridges the humanities, social sciences, cognitive sciences, physical sciences, and the biological sciences, making linguistics in general, and dialect syntax in particular, an ideal hub for cross-disciplinary interaction and communication.
In recent years, the REEDS network was established to promote such an interdisciplinary approach to the study of dialect syntax and address the long-standing challenges hindering collaborative approaches. Three main challenges were identified.
The first challenge concerns the lack of infrastructure, which affects the comparability of results across different projects due to differences in data type, collection methods, and annotation practices.

The second challenge is methodological: the large and complex digital datasets yielded by past, ongoing, and future projects require the development of new methodologies that combine not only grammatical but also geographical and social information, while also being powerful enough to analyze variable and multivariate data.

Finally, the third challenge concerns the theoretical dimension. Even though dialect syntax has drawn interest from formal, computational-quantitative, and socio-linguistic perspectives (see references above), there is little interdisciplinary collaboration between these subfields (Cornips 2015, Hinskens 2017). The same persists within subdisciplines, too. For instance, even within theoretical linguistics, collaborations between syntacticians and phonologists are uncommon, despite the potential benefit such a collaboration might have for refining our understanding of grammatical microvariation and its theoretical implications.

This workshop directly addresses the third challenge: the theoretical modeling of syntax microvariation from an interdisciplinary perspective. Our goal is to foster dialogue and collaboration on dialect syntax both between theoretical syntax and other linguistic disciplines (e.g., computational-quantitative linguistics, sociolinguistics, dialectology, etc.) and within theoretical linguistics (e.g. semantics, morphology, and phonology).
To this end, we encourage the submission of (joint) talks where scholars with different backgrounds (e.g. theoretical syntax & sociolinguistics, sociolinguistics & computational linguistics, theoretical syntax & phonology, etc.) collaborate to present and discuss novel findings and analyses in dialect syntax, which crucially rely on this interdisciplinary approach.

Therefore, we seek:
a) contributions on dialect syntax which combine methods, techniques, or procedures from other disciplines in the collection, processing and/or analysis of the data and
b) contributions on computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, and sociolinguistics, as well as semantic, morphological, and phonological theory that have implications for dialect syntax.

The workshop will take place in person in Leuven (Belgium) on 11-12 of December. It will open with a keynote talk on the state of the art of theoretical microvariation by three leading scholars in the field. On the second day, these scholars will also lead a roundtable discussion summarizing the workshop's key findings.

The contributions presented at the workshop will be considered for publication in a dedicated volume or a special issue of a journal (e.g. Journal of Comparative Germanic Syntax, Journal of Romance Linguistics, Language Variation & Change etc.).
Final remark: We would like to emphasize that researchers interested in interdisciplinary collaboration but who have not yet found a suitable collaborator are warmly encouraged to use the REEDS-network to identify and connect with potential collaborators.

Abstract Guidelines:
Abstracts should not exceed two pages, including data, references, and diagrams. They must be formatted in at least 11-point font with one‐inch margins on letter-size (8.5 by 11 inch) or A4 paper. Submissions must be anonymous. Each author may submit a maximum of two abstracts, with no more than one being single-authored. Only electronic submissions will be accepted.

Please submit your abstract using the EasyAbs link https://easyabs.linguistlist.org/submit/REEDS_MUMOVA2025/

Invited Speakers:
Esther Rinke
Diego Pescarini
Jenny Cheshire

Important Dates:
Submission deadline: 15 August 2025
Notification of acceptance: beginning October 2025
Workshop: 11-12 December

Organizing Committee:
Edoardo Cavirani (KU Leuven)
Cora Cavirani-Pots (University of Cambridge)
Carolina Fraga (University of Southern California)
William Oliver (Stony Brook University)
Jeroen van Craenenbroeck (KU Leuven/Meertens Institute)
Marjo van Koppen (Meertens Institute/Utrecht University)