OASIS 6 is the sixth meeting of Ontology As Structured by the Interfaces with Semantics.
Photos from the previous OASIS meeting
OASIS 6 (Ontology As Structured by the Interfaces with Semantics 6) will take place at the Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa, 13-16 October, 2026.
The OASIS conference series aims to promote conversation across different disciplines that interface with semantics, using ontological questions as shared reference points. The broad questions in the background are these:
1. What basic ontological building blocks do we use to talk and think about the world?
2. How do these building blocks get combined?
3. And how do grammatical and cognitive phenomena motivate the answers to the first two questions?
For more information, see the OASIS credo.
We welcome submissions from semantics and semantics-adjacent domains, including philosophy and the cognitive sciences. We will host sessions bringing together linguists and philosophers to discuss foundational questions in linguistics and their relation to broader philosophical issues. The sessions will introduce some of the central assumptions and frameworks of contemporary linguistic theory and provide informal opportunities for interdisciplinary exchange. Philosophers and others interested in language, mind, or cognition are particularly encouraged to attend.
Invited speakers:
Enoch Aboh, University of Amsterdam
Ofra Magidor, University of Oxford
Linnaea Stockall, Queen Mary University of London
Satellite session: Creoles as windows on language and cognition
This special session will focus on Creoles as full-fledged natural languages that emerged in certain socio-historical environments shaped by European colonial expansion. For any given theory of Creole formation, those contexts involve language contact and innovation through complex processes of language acquisition, therefore providing a particular starting point for research on how conceptual categories are mapped into diverse grammatical systems.
Abstract submission:
Abstracts are due on May 15, 2026. Submission will be via the conference Open Review page.
Authors should be aware of OpenReview's moderation policy for newly created profiles in the Call for Papers:
If you are submitting for the satellite workshop, please indicate this by including “[for satellite workshop]” under the title of your abstract.
Abstracts must be anonymous, in pdf format, 2 A4 pages, in a font size no less than 12pt. You may submit at most two abstracts but can be single author on only one.
Linguists and any others submitting very technical research: It is absolutely necessary that you do what you can to make your abstract accessible to an interdisciplinary audience. This doesn't mean eschewing all formalism, but do pitch your abstract so that a non-technical reader can get something interesting out of it.
Important dates:
Submission deadline: May 15
Notification: June 30
Contact:
oasis6lisboa@letras.ulisboa.pt
Enoch Aboh is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam. He is interested in the learnability of Human Language with a special focus on theoretical syntax, in comparative syntax (e.g., Kwa vs. Germanic/Romance, Kwa vs. Sinitic, Kwa vs. Caribbean creoles), in the discourse-syntax interface, and in language creation and language change.
Ofra Magidor is the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at the University of Oxford and Magdalen College. She holds a B.Sc in philosophy, mathematics, and computer science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a BPhil and DPhil in philosophy from the University of Oxford. Her work covers a wide range of issues in metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophical logic, and epistemology. She is the author of two books: Category Mistakes (OUP2013) and Property Versatility and Copredication (OUP 2025, co-authored with David Liebesman).
Linnaea Stockall is Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Neuroscience at Queen Mary University of London. Her work focuses on the earliest stages of linguistic information extraction and processing involved in the retrieval of individual words and parts of words, and in the combination of those pieces to form complex utterances. She is interested in how we store and process morphological constituents, how early, automatic morphological processing mechanisms handle irregularity, and how we assemble morphological constituents into interpretable words and phrases. She is also interested in how lexical semantic information is extracted and integrated into syntactic structures, and how those structures are interpreted, and in how the semantics of roots interacts with the syntax and semantics of functional morphemes.
We'll put up information about Lisbon and the venue here shortly.
OASIS, Ontology As Structured by the Interfaces with Semantics, is an umbrella organization for research about and around formal semantic ontology. It started as an international research network funded by the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique from 2017 to 2021, and is continuing as a yearly in-person conference. In addition, our vision is to build a digital infrastructure that will allow the community to interact more online.
We're working on it! There will be two ways to interact with OASIS: receiving a newsletter tailored to your own particular interests, and being a member. Members will generate the content of the newsletter by posting just a few of their own publications or other items on the OASIS site each year, and will be welcome to have a profile in the People section of the OASIS site.
What we are building is the backend where members can post, as well as an automated (but friendly) system of email reminders to post. You can sign up to be notified when the newsletter and membership system are ready. After they go online, we have other ideas for building online community that we look forward to discussing with OASIS members.
Here are photos from OASIS 5 which was held in Edinburgh, UK.
Contact us at oasis6lisboa@letras.ulisboa.pt.
