In an attempt to foster collaborative research in linguistics across various universities, Nanzan University hosted a number of international conferences, seminars, and workshops in the past couple of years, with participants gathering from around the world. Primary research areas focused are syntax, syntax-semantics interface, and language acquisition.

On February 20th 2007 a joint workshop was held on Linguistic Theory and Language Acquisition between Connecticut-Nanzan and Siena. The speakers were William Snyder from University of Connecticut (UConn) (Children’s grammatical conservatism: Implications for linguistic theory), Giuliano Bocci from University of Siena (On the criterial positions in the left edge in Italian: Evidence for the syntactic encoding of Contrastive Focus), Natalia Rakhlin from UConn (A pragmatic account of q-spreading), Adriana Belleti from University of Siena (Pronouns and the edge of the clause) and Tomohiro Fujii and Takita Kensuke from Nanzan University (Wh-adverbials, their island-(in) sensitivity and the role of demonstratives in wh-in situ licensing).

There were two poster sessions where students from various universities put up their posters for display and discussion. Some of the poster presenters were Tasneem Firdaus Ali (CIEFL), Jeff Bernath (UConn), Elisa Bennetti (Siena), Jean Crawford (UConn), Lila Daskalaki (Cambridge), Ting-Ting Christina Hsu (Tsing Hua), Marios Mavrogiorgos (Cambridge), Mythili Menon (CIEFL), Masato Niimura (Nanzan), Irene Utzeri (Siena) Criterial freezing, EPP and ECP effects.
The following day a consortium symposium was held with a keynote address by Luigi Rizzi (University of Siena) on Criterial freezing, EPP and ECP effects. The other speakers included Ian Roberts from University of Cambridge (Structure and linearization in Disharmonic word orders), K.A Jayaseelan from CIEFL, Hyderabad (The left periphery of vP), W.T Dylan Tsai of Tsing Hua University (Self and Wh). The symposium was preceded by a three-day workshop on Language acquisition where classes were taken by Adriana Belleti, Luigi Rizzi, Diane Lillo Martin and Keiko Murasugi.

A workshop jointly organized by Nanzan university and CIEFL was held on October 21st and 22nd 2006 where a six member team of faculty and students from CIEFL participated. The area of focus was Argument structure with special reference to the syntax-semantics interface. The papers presented included Transitivity Alternation and the Layered VP by P. Madhavan (CIEFL), Discourse Effects, Case Marking and Scrambling in OV Languages by Hiroshi Aoyagi (Nanzan Univ.), Experiencer and Possessor Constructions in Hindi: A Lexical Relational Account by Vineet Chaturvedi (CIEFL), The Experiencer Construction in Bangla by Paroma Sanyal (CIEFL) Controlling Japanese Experiencer by Tomohiro Fujii (Nanzan Univ.), Wh-phrases, Negative Polarity Items, and Anti-Superiority Effects in Japanese by Masumi Aono (Nanzan Univ.) and Experiencer as Locative by K. A. Jayaseelan (CIEFL).