(POSTPONED) Florida Linguistics Yearly Meeting 2026 (FLYM2026)

Due to Hurricane Isaias, FLYM 2026 has been postponed to a later date

Oct. 9-10, 2026, Florida State University

About FLYM

The Florida Linguistics Yearly Meeting is an annual conference that brings together researchers across subfields of linguistics, including phonetics/phonology, syntax, first and second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and computational linguistics. The 2026 meeting will be held at Florida State University Oct. 9-10, and the theme is “Native American and Indigenous Languages and Contact."

Call for papers

The FSU Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics is delighted to invite submissions for the FLYM to be held Oct. 9-10, 2026. The theme for this year’s conference is "Native American and Indigenous Languages and Contact." We will be inviting submissions in any area of linguistics. In the spirit of the theme, we particularly welcome submissions focused on Native American and Indigenous languages and language contact (involving any language). The conference will include sessions for oral presentations and posters.

This year, we are also excited to announce that our keynote speaker will be Rosa Vallejos Yopán, Ph.D., from the University of New Mexico.

Submission instructions:

Please submit your abstract via easyabs.

Abstracts should be anonymous and a maximum of 500 words, excluding references.

Abstract deadline: July 24, 2026

Final notification of acceptance: Sept. 1, 2026

Invited Speaker

Rosa Vallejos-Yopán is a professor of linguistics at the University of New Mexico. She specializes in the documentation and analysis of Amazonian languages, with an emphasis on morphosyntax, language documentation, language contact and bilingualism. Since 1997, she has conducted in-situ fieldwork as well as several interconnected projects driven by a desire to find a balance between her academic work and her commitment to the communities with whom she works. She has published numerous articles on Kukama (Tupí-Guaraní), Secoya (Tukano) and Amazonian Spanish. Her most recent publications address topics such as the conceptualization of space, the conceptualization of color, the categorization of entities, and the emergence of grammar. She is the author of "A Grammar of Kukama-Kukamiria: A language from the Amazon" (Brill 2016), co-author of "Diccionario kukama-castellano" (Formabiap 2015), co-editor of "Nonverbal predication in Amazonian languages" (John Benjamins 2018), and co-editor of "Morfosintaxis: Una mirada desde las Americas" (forthcoming). Vallejos-Yopán also collaborates with language communities in orthography design, teacher training and the creation of school materials to support their own language maintenance efforts. She teaches courses and mentors students on projects dealing with linguistic structures and the role languages have in the lives of people as repositories for their identity, collective memory, and cultural history. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Hans Rausing Endangered Language Program and the Endangered Language Fund.

Visit her website

Abstract

Color conceptualization and crosslinguistic influence among Secoya-Spanish bilinguals

Color is embedded in the material culture and traditional technologies of the Secoyas from the Amazon basin. Secoya (Tukanoan) remains the dominant language in their villages, though Secoya-Spanish bilingualism is emerging. The large typological distance between Secoya and Spanish extends to the grammar of color. In Spanish, basic color terms are highly conventionalized adjectives. While Secoya has simple color terms, it can also describe any portion of the chromatic spectrum using three comparative constructions. The attributive construction conveys that objects share a feature (e.g., the dress has a mold attribute ‘The dress is blue’); the similative construction indicates that the objects are alike (e.g., the dress is corn stalk-like ‘The dress is green’); and the equative construction expresses that the objects are identical (e.g., the dress is identical to scarlet macaw ‘The dress is red’). In other words, Secoya comparative constructions profile degrees of similarity between a given object and elements from the environment. The conceptual differences between Secoya and Spanish prompts the following question: what happens when bilinguals who speak languages with such structurally divergent color-naming strategies must select names for specific color categories? To address this question, I collected responses to an implicit naming task from 30 participants in Secoya and 15 participants in Spanish. Eight color categories were shown in a 4-min stimulus video depicting different-colored fish eating one another. Participants produced descriptions in real time. The color expressions were coded for origin language, color category, morphosyntactic complexity, as well as the participants’ bilingual profile, age and gender. In the Spanish task, Secoya loanwords were not used to name color. In the Secoya task, 27% of participants used only Secoya expressions, but 73% employed a combination of Secoya expressions and Spanish loanwords. In Secoya, participants almost categorically used native terms for specific primary categories (black, red, white) but increasingly relied on Spanish loanwords for other primary categories (yellow, blue, green) and derived categories (pink, gray). Additionally, loanword usage increased for color categories with high labeling variability and high complexity in Secoya. While male participants selected significantly less Spanish terms, loanword usage is not linked to language proficiency or age. Loanword usage is linked to universal perception of focal points, the conventionalization and communicative usefulness of color expressions, and color conceptualizations based on comparison. Overall, these findings suggest that the interplay of cognitive constraints and color conceptualization shapes language use in the context of emerging bilingualism.