Call for Abstracts

The LSA invites current and prospective members to submit abstracts for papers and posters to be presented at its 2025 Annual Meeting, which will take place in person in Philadelphia from January 9-12, 2025.

Abstracts will be accepted through Oxford Abstracts until June 30th at 11:59 pm Pacific time.

* You will be directed to Oxford Abstract to submit your proposal. If you don't have an account with Oxford Abstracts, please create one to access the submission page. This account is different from your LSA Membership account. If you need technical support for the Oxford Abstracts platform, please visit the Guidance for Submitters on the Oxford Abstracts Support webpage.

Categories of Presentations

This call for abstracts covers two categories of presentations at the 2025 Annual Meeting: poster and 20-minute talk presentations. During submission, abstract submitters must specify their choice of format: poster only, paper only, or either. These choices are not accessible during the review process, to ensure that all abstracts are evaluated strictly according to content and not according to type of presentation.

Poster Sessions

Depending on the subject and/or content, it may be more appropriate to submit an abstract to the poster sessions for visual presentation rather than a 20-minute paper session. In general, the sort of research that is most effectively presented as a poster draws its major conclusions from the thoughtful examination of charts and graphs rather than a sustained chain of verbal argumentation. Therefore, the authors want to make points in narrative form that are as brief as possible. The poster should be able to "stand-alone," that is, be understandable even if the author is not present, and should not require audiovisual support.

The posters accepted for presentation at the Annual Meeting are assigned to one of three Poster Sessions to be scheduled on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Authors are expected to be present during the official poster session to discuss their research and answer any questions. The posters may be left on display throughout the day during the day they are presented. The Plenary Poster Sessions are designed to showcase the increasingly common research modalities that are optimally adapted for presentation as a poster.

Guidelines for presenting an LSA poster

20-Minute Papers

The papers accepted for presentation at the Annual Meeting will be scheduled in themed sessions on Thursday evening, Friday and Saturday morning and afternoon, and on Sunday morning. Each paper presentation lasts 20 minutes, followed by 10 minutes of discussion.

Guidelines for giving an LSA paper

The Five-minute Linguist

The Five-Minute Linguist is a high-profile event that features LSA members giving lively and engaging presentations about their research in a manner accessible to the general public. No notes, no podium, and an actual timer. A winner is chosen at the end of the event. The goal of this event is to encourage LSA members to practice presenting their work to a broad audience and to showcase outstanding examples of members who can explain their research in an accessible way.

When the call for abstracts goes out for the Annual Meeting, all LSA members will have the opportunity to prepare a 300-word pitch for the Five Minute Linguist event. Members who submit regular abstracts for the Annual Meeting will see a checkbox that they may use to enter their pitch for this event, but abstracts will also be accepted that are not concurrently submitted for the Annual Meeting and may have been presented elsewhere or that are being considered for presentation at one of the LSA's Sister Societies.

Please note that the Five Minute Linguist pitch is not simply a shortened version of the main (500-word) LSA abstract. Instead, it should be written in an accessible style that would be more suitable for the target audience, namely, the general public.

Submissions for the Five-minute Linguist, a continuing special plenary event at the LSA Annual Meeting, now in its seventh year, are also accepted via Oxford Abstracts.

Abstract submission

We encourage those considering a submission to view our model sample abstracts, revisit our recent webinars on "How to Submit an Abstract for the LSA Annual Meeting" and "Abstract Writing: How to Convince in a Page," and read more about the 2025 Annual Meeting.

The Program Committee requires that the subject matter be linguistic and that the abstract be coherent and in accord with published specifications. Each abstract will be reviewed by members of the Program Committee and by expert external reviewers. The members of the Program Committee accept and reject abstracts based on the ratings assigned by the reviewers. The Program Committee co-chairs then meet to assemble the final program and arrange each paper and poster session. As in the past, there is no upper limit on the number of papers in any subarea.

General Requirements

Abstracts for 20-minute papers and posters must be submitted electronically on Oxford Abstracts by the deadline stated above.
The submitting author must be a member of the Linguistic Society. Nonmembers may join here.
Any member may submit one single-author abstract. There is no limit on the number of co-authored abstracts. An organized session paper or poster counts as a multi-author abstract submission.
Presentations must be delivered by one or more individuals listed as an author on the originally submitted abstract.
After an abstract has been submitted, no changes of author, affiliation, title, or wording of the abstract, other than those due to typographical errors, are permitted.
Papers and posters must be delivered as projected in the abstract or represent bona fide developments of the same research.
Authors should not submit abstracts for research that has already been presented at other major conferences, or that has been published in a journal, as a book chapter, or in conference proceedings.
Presenters must pre-register for the meeting.
Authors may not submit identical abstracts for presentation at the LSA meeting and a meeting of one of the co-locating Sister Societies. Authors who do so will have both abstracts removed from consideration. Authors may submit substantially different abstracts for presentation at the LSA meeting and a co-locating Sister Society meeting.

Abstract Format Guidelines

Abstracts must be submitted in PDF format.
The main text for each abstract must be no more than 500 words and fit on one 8.5x11 page. An optional second page may be used for the presentation of linguistic examples, plots, figures, tables, other diagrams, and references, or these can be integrated into the 1-page abstract. Margins may be no smaller than 1/2 inch and font no smaller than 10 points. Abstracts that do not exactly follow these formatting requirements will be rejected without review.
Your name should only appear on the Abstract Submittal Form. If you identify yourself in any way on the abstract itself (e.g., "In Smith (1992)...I"), the abstract will be rejected without being evaluated. In addition, be sure to anonymize your .pdf document by clicking on "File" and then "Properties," removing your name if it appears in the "Author" line, and resaving it before uploading it. Contact the LSA if you have difficulty anonymizing your .pdf as described above. In addition, be aware that abstract file names may not be automatically anonymized. Please do not use your name (e.g., Smith LSA Abstract 2022) when saving your abstract in .pdf format, but rather use non-author-identifying information (e.g., First Words of Abstract LSA 2022).
Abstracts that do not conform to the format guidelines will not be considered.

Abstract Contents

Many abstracts are rejected because they omit crucial information rather than because of errors in what they include. Authors may wish to consult the abstract models prepared by the Program Committee.

Authors are encouraged to consult the LSA Guidelines for Inclusive Language when drafting their abstract and identifying linguistic examples to illustrate the phenomenon under investigation.

A suggested outline for abstracts is as follows:

Choose a title that clearly indicates the topic of the research and is not more than one 7-inch typed line. Note that your choice of title has considerable influence on how your paper or poster is grouped with others to form thematically coherent sessions. A clear relationship between the title and content of your abstract will help ensure it is assigned to an appropriate session, should it be selected for presentation.
State the problem or research question raised by prior work, with specific reference to relevant prior research.
State the main point or argument of the proposed presentation.
Regardless of the subfield, cite sufficient data and explain why and how they support the main point or argument. When examples are in languages other than English, provide word-by-word glosses and underline the portions of the examples that are critical to the argument. Explain abbreviations at their first occurrence.
If your research presents the results of experiments, but the collection of results is not yet complete, report what results you've already obtained in sufficient detail so that your abstract may be evaluated. Also, explicitly indicate the nature of the experimental design and the specific hypothesis tested.
State the relevance of your ideas to past work or the future development of the field. Describe analyses in as much detail as possible. Avoid saying, in effect, "A solution to this problem will be presented." If you are taking a stand on a controversial issue, summarize the arguments that led you to your position.
State the contribution to linguistic research made by the analysis.
Citation in the text of the relevant literature is essential. A separate list of references may be included after the abstract.
When you submit your abstract to the website, please identify as accurately as possible a primary field on the basis of the abstract's general topic area, and use the secondary field to indicate methodology or a secondary topic. For example, a paper or poster about the production of relative clauses could have "syntax" as its primary field and "psycholinguistics" as the secondary field. This will make it easier to assign your abstract to appropriate reviewers.

Have questions?

Questions about the content of the talk and poster may be directed to the Program Committee Chairs: Kamil Deen and David Quinto-Pozos.
Questions about the 5ML pitch may be directed to the Public Relations Committee Chairs: Georgia Zellou and Anne Pycha.
If you need technical support for the Oxford Abstracts platform, please visit the Guidance for Submitters on the Oxford Abstracts Support webpage or email membership@lsadc.org.