PhD position at Cologne University

[khaude at UNI-KOELN.DE]

The Department of Linguistics at the University of Cologne offers a Ph.D.
student position (German pay-scale TVL-E13, 50%, 19,92 hours)) for up to 2,5
years, starting January 1, 2010.

The position belongs to the DFG-funded project "The Movima inverse from a
typological perspective", which forms part of the collaborative EuroBABEL
project "Referential Hierarchies in Morphosyntax" (www.rhim.uni-koeln.de) and
will run until July 2012. Besides the interaction with the EuroBABEL team, the
research will be carried out in close collaboration with the project
"Information Structure: Syntax and Typology" directed by Prof. Robert D. Van
Valin and Dr. Dejan Matic at the Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in
Nijmegen.

The successful candidate will prepare a doctoral dissertation on information
structure with the focus on Movima, an unclassified language of lowland
Bolivia. Movima is of particular interest in this respect because its
transitive clauses are organized according to referential properties of the
argument NPs, with parameters like person and discourse status interacting in
complex ways. Based on existing electronic corpora, the research will involve
the analysis of syntactic, morphological and prosodic phenomena affected by
discourse pragmatics. Depending on the candidate's profile, there may also be
an option for fieldwork in Bolivia.

Ideally, the candidate will present the following skills:
- a thorough training in general linguistics, with emphasis on morphosyntax,
typology, field methods and language documentation
- good competence in spoken and written English (the lingua franca of the
international projects)
- good knowledge of Spanish (the language into which the Movima data are
translated)
- some basic knowledge of computational tools in documentary linguistics

Applicants should have graduated in linguistics or else be able to present the
official date by which they will receive their degree.

The ideal starting date will be January 1, 2010, but the position will be open
until filled.

Please send your application (pdf of CV, a max. 1-page abstract of the master's
thesis, a list of relevant courses taken, and a short description of research
interests), by e-mail to Dr. Katharina Haude (address below).

The application deadline is November 8, 2009.

For further information contact:

Dr. Katharina Haude
Institut für Linguistik
Universität zu Köln
D-50923 Köln
e-mail: khaude at uni-koeln.de