19th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics

The 19th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics (WAFL 19) provides a specialized forum for formal linguistic analysis of the Altaic language families—Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Korean, and Japanese—with an emphasis on syntactic, morphological, and semantic theory. These agglutinative, head-final languages present distinctive empirical challenges and opportunities for formal grammatical theory.

Syntacticians, morphologists, and semanticists who work on Altaic languages or who use data from these languages to test theoretical proposals gather to present and critique formal analyses of phenomena such as scrambling, case, postpositions, evidentiality, and verb-final clause structure. WAFL is an important venue for researchers whose empirical base lies outside the Indo-European languages that have historically dominated formal linguistics, and it helps ensure that theoretical generalizations are genuinely cross-linguistic rather than parochial.