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Finiteness is a topic that influences and interacts with virtually every  syntactic and interface property in linguistics. It deals directly with  the core functional properties of a clause such as its tense, aspect  and mood and with the way in which these are anchored to the outside  world (anaphorically, deictically or somewhere in-between). In addition,  finiteness also affects, directly or in more mediated fashion, nominal  reference within a clause particularly as it pertains to the syntactic  subject. Thus, issues such as the morpho-phonological (c)overtness of a  subject, its case/Case and degree of syntactic-semantic anaphoricity  could be seen as a function of the finiteness of the clause as a whole.  South Asian languages offer fertile ground for investigation in the  realm of finiteness because, as is becoming increasingly well-known,  they exhibit properties that challenge much conventional wisdom on the  subject. Complex predication in Bangla (Ramchand 2008 and prior),  long-distance agreement (Bhatt 2005) and correlative constructions  (Dayal 1991) in Hindi/Urdu, topic, focus and scrambling (Mahajan 1999,  Kidwai 2000) and diachronic aspect shifts (Condoravdi and Deo 2008) in  Indo-Aryan, nominative anaphors in Dravidian (Amritavalli 1984, Woolford  1999, Lidz 2004), Dravidian hybrid nominalizations with both tense and  Case marking (Amritavalli and Jayaseelan 2005), serial verb constuctions  in Malayalam (Jayaseelan 2004), and overt nominative, nonfinite  subjects in Sinhala (Gair 2005) and Dravidian (K.P. Mohanan 1982) are  only some of the challenging phenomena discussed previously. Yet, this  only scratches the surface -- many languages of the Indo-Aryan,  Dravidian and other families in South Asia remain under-researched and  under-publicized to this day. It is the goal of this conference to  bridge this gap in empirical and theoretical coverage of these  phenomena.http://castl.uit.no/index.php?option=com_content&#38;view=article&#38;id=199:-finiteness-in-south-asian-languages-&#38;catid=76:conferencesaworkshopsKeynote Talks:There will be 4 invited talks, each followed by a prepared response by an invited discussant.Rajesh Bhatt, U. Mass., Amherst; Discussant: Miriam Butt, KonstanzVeneeta Dayal, Rutgers; Discussant: Gillian Ramchand, TromsøAshwini Deo, Yale; Discussant: Thomas McFadden, TromsøK.A. Jayaseelan, EFLU, Hyderabad; Discussant: Sandhya Sundaresan, Tromsø/Stuttgart