15th Fachtagung of the Indogermanische Gesellschaft 2016

Back to the Root - The Structure, Function, and Semantics of the PIE Root

The fifteenth Fachtagung der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft will be held at the Institut für Sprachwissenschaft at the University of Vienna from 13-16 September 2016.  The organizing theme of the workshop will be the root, including the role that it plays in both the grammar of Proto-Indo-European and in the daughter languages.  The (Proto-) Indo-European root is formally and semantically the basis of every (Proto-) Indo-European verbal and nominal stem. Despite this prominence, the properties of roots have received comparatively little in the way of detailed investigation.  Our goal for this Fachtagung is to fill this gap.  We welcome contributions that examine the role of the root in the grammatical system of Proto-Indo-European and the daughter languages, investigations of Indo-European root structure (and the constraints on root structure), as well as discussions of root-extensions and investigations of the semantics of individual roots.  The concept of the root is prominent also in theoretical linguistics (as, for instance, in Distributed Morphology) and lexical semantics.  We accordingly welcome abstracts that engage with questions raised by theoretical models.