About SOUL

The Syntax of Uralic Languages (SOUL) is a recently launched series of conferences organized biannually for linguists working on, or having an interest in, Uralic languages. Over the last few years, the syntax of the Uralic languages has become an exciting field of study in linguistic theory. With its wealth of yet-to-be-charted domains of (morpho)syntactic phenomena, wide range of variation as well as family-specific characteristics, the Uralic family offers an abundant source of insights for theories of human language with respect to topics like word order change, contact phenomena, information structure, subordination, finiteness, negation, aspect, possession, agreement, evidentiality and many more.

The meeting seeks to provide a forum to present and discuss topical issues in syntax and its grammatical interfaces in present-day or older Uralic languages, including both comparative work as well as studies of single languages or dialects, pursued from any theoretical or empirical perspective. It is the aim of the series to advance research by fostering a productive exchange of results and ideas across different linguistic frameworks, promoting further integration and cross-fertilization of current directions of inquiry in the field.

The first SOUL took place as part of the 12th International Congress for Finno-Ugric Studies held at the University of Oulu on 17–21 August 2015 (under the title The Syntactic Structure of Uralic Languages, http://ssul.nytud.hu/), together with a sister workshop titled ‘The Syntax of Samoyedic and Ob-Ugric Languages’ organized by Larisa Leisiö and Irina Nikolaeva. Inspired by the success of the Oulu workshops, SOUL 2017 (http://www.nytud.hu/soul2017) was organized two years later jointly by The Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Pázmány Péter Catholic University on 27–28 June 2017 in Budapest. The upcoming third meeting will take place in June 2019 in Tartu, Estonia.