Formal Approaches to South Asian Linguistics 14
The (Formal) Approaches to South Asian Languages [FASAL] conference is the main North American venue dedicated to the presentation and discussion of linguistic research on South Asian languages.
We welcome all submissions that draw on data from South Asian languages (including Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, and Tibeto-Burman languages) to make novel insights into the nature of the language faculty.
We especially welcome submissions relevant to this year’s special theme of locality in South Asian languages. Constraints on long-distance dependencies have been part of linguistic theorizing for decades, but as data from previously less–studied languages and language families comes to light these theories must contend with the full range of attested patterns. South Asian languages have proved to play in invaluable role in advancing linguistic theory in this way; accounts of long-distance agreement in Hindi-Urdu (Bhatt 2005), long-distance wh-in-situ in Malayalam (Aravind 2018), and long relativization in Tibetan (Erlewine 2019) come to mind as three examples of recent contributions from different South Asian language families.
On that note, we welcome contributions that shed light on (anti-)locality restrictions in grammar with data from South Asian languages. We also welcome work in the realm of South Asian linguistics that examines locality from the perspective of external factors like acquisition, processing, and computational efficiency. While work on South Asian languages in these domains has historically been underrepresented in the literature, this has changed a great deal in recent years (see, for example, Chacón et al. 2016’s psycholinguistic study of locality in dependency formation in Bangla).
We particularly welcome submissions on under-researched and endangered South Asian languages.We encourage submissions from minority groups including researchers located in South Asia and other diaspora communities.We encourage interdisciplinary submissions that incorporate experimental, computational, acquisition or fieldwork into linguistic theory-building.