<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="margin: 0cm; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif;" class=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class="">Dear colleagues</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><o:p class=""></o:p></span></div><div style="margin: 0cm; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; caret-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><o:p class=""></o:p></span></div><div style="margin: 0cm; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; caret-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class="">Ben Ambridge at the University of Manchester is seeking potential collaborators for a grant application for a large crosslinguistic project investigating children’s acquisition of inflectional morphology. We aim to include 12-15 typologically-diverse languages. Due to the size of the envisaged project, it would not be feasible to apply for funding for full-time research assistants to test children (or to fund a portion of each collaborator’s salary). Instead, our intention for the grant application is that each collaborator will be able to claim up to €50k for expenses (e.g., travel, laptops, participant payments, part-time/casual researchers), with the data to be collected by a researcher who is already primarily sponsored/employed (e.g., as PhD student, postdoc or research assistant) at your institution. We will provide computerized elicitation tasks; your role (with the help of full-time research and support staff employed at our end) would be to adapt the task for your language and inflectional system and to supervise data collection (with children aged 3-6, and adults).</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><o:p class=""></o:p></span></div><div style="margin: 0cm; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; caret-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><o:p class=""></o:p></span></div><div style="margin: 0cm; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; caret-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class="">In particular, we are looking for languages with<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>one or more (ideally several) of<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>the following properties:</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><o:p class=""></o:p></span></div><div style="margin: 0cm; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; caret-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><o:p class=""></o:p></span></div><div style="margin: 0cm; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; caret-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(38, 40, 42);" class="">(1) uses<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><b class="">prefixes, infixes or some combination</b><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>(rather than only suffixes) to mark tense/person/number/case, (2) has<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><b class="">low syncretism</b>, (3) has<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><b class="">high flexivity</b>, (4) uses<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><b class="">monoexponential (or separative) morphemes<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></b>rather than polyexponential (or cumulative) morphemes, (5) uses<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><b class="">isolating or nonlinear (ablaut/tonal) morphology</b><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>(as opposed to/as well as concatenative morphology), (6) has<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><b class="">multiple gender categories<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></b>beyond masculine/feminine/neuter, (7) marks<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><b class="">aspect</b></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""> </span></span><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class="">(with or without also marking tense)</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(38, 40, 42);" class="">, (8) has<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><b class="">dual-number</b><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>(or similar), as opposed to just singular/plural, (9) has<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><b class="">verb agreement for OBJECTs</b><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>instead of/as well as SUBJECTS, (10) uses a<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><b class="">(split-)ergative system</b><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>rather than nominative-accusative, (11) has an unusually<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><b class="">high or low number of noun cases</b><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>(as opposed to the typical 6-7), (12) has case markers that can be attached to<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><b class="">other elements of Noun Phrases</b>, not just nouns.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><o:p class=""></o:p></span></div><div style="margin: 0cm; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; caret-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(38, 40, 42);" class=""> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><o:p class=""></o:p></span></div><div style="margin: 0cm; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; caret-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(38, 40, 42);" class="">Ideally, the language should also have some kind of<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><b class="">corpus</b><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>that will allow us to estimate the frequency of different inflected verb and noun forms (ideally child-directed-speech, but adult-to-adult speech is also possible); and ideally you would have some experience of<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><b class="">running production studies</b><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>with the relevant population.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><o:p class=""></o:p></span></div><div style="margin: 0cm; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; caret-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(38, 40, 42);" class=""> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><o:p class=""></o:p></span></div><div style="margin: 0cm; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; caret-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class="">For more information, please email<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="mailto:Ben.Ambridge@Manchester.ac.uk" title="mailto:Ben.Ambridge@Manchester.ac.uk" style="color: blue;" class=""><span style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134);" class="">Ben.Ambridge@Manchester.ac.uk</span></a><o:p class=""></o:p></span></div><div style="margin: 0cm; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif;" class=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class="">Thanks<o:p class=""></o:p></span></div><div style="margin: 0cm; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif;" class=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class="">Ben</span></div></body></html>