Pronominal systems represent one of the most fertile testing grounds for understanding grammar as a symbolic system adapted to a stochastic cognitive environment. Pronouns are minimal in descriptive content but maximal in context dependency: they enable reference-tracking without lexical repetition, interact closely with information structure, and frequently give rise to mismatches between form and meaning (Onea et al. 2023).

The 2026 edition of the Vienna Workshops on Portuguese Linguistics, held on 24–25 September 2026 at the University of Vienna, takes this as its starting point. This edition is dedicated entirely to pronouns and pronominal systems across the Lusophone world and related varieties. By focusing on pronouns, we aim to examine how different systems encode reference, salience, argument structure, and information status, and how these processes vary across Portuguese in Europe, Brazil, Africa, and Portuguese-based creoles.

The workshop invites contributions on any aspect of pronominal grammar, including but not limited to: clitic doubling, null objects, reference tracking, person and animacy effects, case and alignment patterns, pronominal allomorphy, discourse-prominence, restructuring, acquisition trajectories, experimental findings, or typological comparisons. Approaches may be theoretical, variationist, data-driven, corpus-based, typological, or acquisition-oriented (L1, L2, heritage).

Abstracts presenting original, unpublished research are invited from scholars working on Portuguese varieties worldwide, Galician, and Portuguese-based creoles.

Keynote speakers:
Jorge Agulló, University of Cambridge
Marlyse Baptista, University of Pennsylvania
Pilar Barbosa, Universidade do Minho
Dante Lucchesi, Universidade Federal da Bahia

Submission instructions:
We invite anonymized abstract submissions for oral presentations or posters via Easyabs (https://easyabs.linguistlist.org/conference/VPL3/). Abstracts should be no longer than 500 words (excluding references), a second page containing examples, graphs or tables may be included. Please submit a word or pdf file. Abstracts can be submitted in Portuguese or English. Each abstract will be reviewed by two reviewers.

We want to encourage early-career researchers to submit their work in this area. To this end we offer two partial travel grants for PhD students to present their work. If you want to apply for the travel grant please indicate this in the abstract submission process.

Multiple submissions: Any one person can submit up to two abstracts, they may be the first author of only one submission and can be co-author/presenter on another one.