PhD Scholarship - Language Acquisition Group

[Kelley Sacco]

MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
Nijmegen, The Netherlands

PhD Scholarship - Language Acquisition Group

The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics solicits applications for
a position as a Ph.D student in the field of First Language
Acquisition.  The student will participate in the Event Representation
Project of the Institute (see below). The position will run for three
years and is available immediately.

Applicants should have completed a B.A. or a Master's degree or
equivalent in linguistics, psychology, or a related field, and they
should have an interest in how languages encode events and their
participants, and how children acquire these structures in the course of
language development.  The successful applicant will develop a
dissertation project of his or her own choosing that can contribute to
the overall goals of the Event Representation Project.  Specific focuses
could range from traditional argument structure concerns (e.g., event
types, predicate semantics and predicate classes, marking of
participants, argument linking, argument ellipsis) to interdisciplinary
issues to do with how events are perceived and apprehended, and how
different languages represent "the same" event in different ways (e.g.,
with a single-verb clause, a serial-verb clause, multiple clauses,  or
with different patterns for packaging given types of meaning into
lexical items). Applicants may work with children learning any language
or languages, but preference may be given to applicants working on the
acquisition of lesser-known languages.

Applications should include a curriculum vitae, a description of
previous related studies and research, a sample of written work, names
and addresses of two referees, and a characterization of plans or
interests for the Ph.D research.  Candidates must also already have, or
be prepared to find, a suitable university affiliation. (This can
perhaps be arranged through MPI staff if necessary.)  Payment is
regulated according to the scale of the Max Planck Society (one half of
the scale II a BAT -  (Bundesangestelltentarifvertrag, The Tariff
Agreemennt for the German Federal Employees).
Please send applications via regular mail for arrival by Oct. 15, 2001
to:

Prof. Melissa Bowerman
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Postbus 310
6500 AH Nijmegen
The Netherlands

E-mail inquiries concerning the position may be made to Melissa Bowerman
(melissa.bowerman at mpi.nl) or Penelope Brown (pbrown at mpi.nl).

The Event Representation Project includes participants from both the
language acquisition and the Language and Cognition departments of the
Institute.  As a continuation and expansion of the former Argument
Structure Project, this project is dedicated to the cross-linguistic
study of how events are construed for purposes of linguistic encoding,
and how children acquire the lexical items and morphosyntactic
structures and patterns that allow them to linguistically represent
events in the ways characteristic of their language/language community.
An additional focus is the relationship between the linguistic encoding
of events and the nonlinguistic (perceptual and cognitive) apprehension
of events.