Ph D student position

[Balthasar Bickel]

(with apologies for cross-posting)

********************************************

The Department of Linguistics at the University of Leipzig offers a Ph  
D student position (German pay-scale TVL-E13/2, for three years,  
subject to statisfactory progress)

The successful candidate will work on his or her doctoral dissertation  
within a research project on differential object marking and optional  
object agreement in two languages of Nepal, Chintang (Sino-Tibetan,  
Kiranti) and Nepali (Indo-Aryan), as part of a newly funded EuroBABEL  
project on "Referential Hierarchies in Morphosyntax" (http://www.esf.org/activities/eurocores/programmes/eurobabel/ 
). More information on the project can be found at http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~typology/differential/ 
.

The student is expected to do fieldwork in Nepal and to work with  
existing electronic corpora (additional tagging, statistical analysis).

The ideal candidate has
- a thorough training in general linguistics, with particular emphasis  
on field methods, typology and semantics
- at least basic knowledge of computational tools in corpus work and  
statistics, ideally some basic programming skills
- excellent social skills and aptitude to collaborate with colleagues  
in a large and multi-ethnic research team
- good competence in spoken and written English (which is the lingua  
franca in the project)

Knowledge of Nepali is essential. It can be acquired in an intensive  
course at the beginning of the project (and paid by the project), but  
if a candidate is already familiar with the language, this is an  
additional asset.

Applicants must have an MA in linguistics.

Please send your application (CV, abstract of MA thesis (max. 2  
pages), and a list of courses taken) by e-mail to Prof. Dr. Balthasar  
Bickel (bickel at uni-leipzig.de, attachments as PDF or plain text only).  
Review of applications will begin  May 25 but applications will be  
received until the position is filled.

The starting date of the position is August 1, 2009, but under special  
circumstances this may be negotiable.