The second international symposium on the languages spoken in Europe and North and Central Asia (LENCA) will take place at Kazan State University, Tatarstan, Russia, on May 11-14, 2004. Kazan is the capital of the Tatarstan Republic in Russia. The topic of the symposium is argument structure and grammatical relations in the languages spoken in this area. The first symposium on the languages belonging to the LENCA-group was at the Udmurt State University, Izhevsk, Udmurtia, Russia, on May 19-22, 2001. The topic of the first symposium was deixis and quantification in languages spoken in Europe and North and Central Asia.

The languages spoken in Europe and North and Central Asia belong to several major language families. The Indo-European, Uralic and Turkic languages are the largest language families in Europe and North and Central Asia. In addition, Tungusic and Palaeo-Siberian languages belong to the indigenous languages of the area. In Central Asia, the area overlaps with the area of the Mongolic languages, and in the Southeast, the Sinitic languages. In the South, the area also borders on the languages spoken in the Caucasus, and the western part of the main area of the Semitic languages is located on the border of the languages spoken in Southern Europe. During the course of history, this area has been a meeting place of numerous cultural and linguistic strands. In most cases, this large area is multi-cultural and multilingual, and many people living in the area know, in addition to their native language, some other languages spoken in the area. Among these languages, the Indo-European languages are best known, but most of the languages spoken in the eastern part of this large area are poorly known even among linguists. New research would also provide material for research on the contacts among these languages, and on the study of the universals of language. For that reason, papers on the languages bordering on the area are also welcome in the symposium. When collecting new information about these languages, it is also possible to gather new information for cross-linguistic studies.

The symposium will last for four days, and if needed, parallel sections can be arranged. Particularly thinking of work in progress, also a separate poster section will be arranged. The abstracts to be submitted to the Programme Committee should not exceed four pages. The abstracts will be published for the symposium, and also an internet version of the abstracts will be available. Authors are encouraged to write their papers so that most of the papers to be presented in the symposium could be published later.

Important dates