[Lingtyp] Vacancy for Research Fellow in the Surrey Morphology Group

[Oliver Bond]

The Surrey Morphology Group (School of Literature and Languages, University
of Surrey) is seeking to appoint a Research Fellow for a three-year Arts
and Humanities Research Council funded project ‘External agreement’
(Principal Investigator: Marina Chumakina; Co-Investigator: Oliver Bond).

Full details about the post, including a job description and how to apply,
are available here:

https://jobs.surrey.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx?ref=006118

The project is a study of external agreement, a linguistic phenomenon
whereby agreement is expressed on typologically unusual targets such as
adverbs, adpositions and pronouns, yet is controlled not by the immediate
syntactic head of the target, but by the subject or grammatically
privileged argument of the clause.

While agreeing prepositions are familiar from languages such as Welsh and
Breton, in these languages the form of preposition depends on the
grammatical properties of the noun it introduces. A situation where the
form of a preposition changes depending on the properties of the clausal
subject (i.e. a controller external to its immediate phrase) has, until
now, escaped linguistic analysis altogether. This is external agreement, a
type of agreement which does not respect the syntactic constituency of a
sentence, but connects elements which belong to different syntactic phrases.

Despite its typological scarcity, external agreement appears with
fascinating regularity in languages of the Nakh-Daghestanian family spoken
in the Caucasus: there are 17 languages with diachronically unrelated
instances of external agreement. Such an abundance of examples appearing in
languages with considerable variation in their syntactic systems makes
external agreement in Nakh-Daghestanian an ideal opportunity for research
into morphosyntactic, semantic and pragmatic mechanisms which regulate not
only agreement, but also the less obvious relationships between syntactic
elements in a sentence.

Our research questions are: (1) What are the syntactic constraints on
external agreement? (2) What are the morphosyntactic properties of external
agreement? (3) How is external agreement constrained within systems with
multiple controllers? (4) How does external agreement develop?

The project involves regular fieldwork in Daghestan (approximately 1 month
per year); the project activities will also include the construction of a
linguistic database.

The successful candidate should have a background in typological
linguistics and sound understanding of syntactic theory and analysis.
Familiarity with formal models of syntax is highly desirable. Experience of
conducting fieldwork and a working command of Russian is essential for
carrying out fieldwork in Daghestan; evidence of skills relevant for
database design and construction would be a plus. Candidates must have the
ability to work independently while functioning as part of a research team.
The position is available from 1 May 2018.

The successful candidate will work as a member of Surrey Morphology Group.
The SMG’s current research includes fieldwork (on Daghestanian,
Oto-Manguean, Slavonic, Nilotic, Papuan and Tibeto-Burman languages),
morphological theory (especially Network Morphology), linguistic typology
(including Canonical Typology) and computational modelling.

Further information about the Surrey Morphology Group and their current
research projects is available at http://www.smg.surrey.ac.uk/.
Informal enquiries may be made to Dr Marina Chumakina (
m.chumakina at surrey.ac.uk), or Dr Oliver Bond (o.bond at surrey.ac.uk).



Dr. Oliver Bond

Senior Lecturer in Linguistics

Surrey Morphology Group
School of Literature and Languages
University of Surrey
Guildford
GU2 7XH
UK

Telephone: +44 (0)1483 689957
Email: o.bond at surrey.ac.uk
Room: 01AC05, AC Building, fifth floor

www.smg.surrey.ac.uk/bond
<http://www.smg.surrey.ac.uk/bond>
http://morph.surrey.ac.uk


Recent publications:

Bond, Oliver, Greville G. Corbett, Marina Chumakina and Dunstan Brown
(eds.). 2016. *Archi: Complexities of agreement in cross-theoretical
perspectives*. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Available now from OUP
<https://global.oup.com/academic/product/archi-9780198747291?cc=gb&lang=en&>

Bond, Oliver. 2016. Negation through reduplication and tone: Implications
for the Lexical Functional Grammar/Paradigm Function Morphology
interface. *Journal
of Linguistics*, 52, 2: 277-310.
doi: 10.1017/S002222671500013 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0022226715000134>

Bond, Oliver and Gregory D. S. Anderson. 2014. Aspectual and focal
functions of Cognate-Head-Dependent Constructions: Evidence from
Africa. *Linguistic
Typology*, 18, 2: 215-250.
doi: 10.1515/lingty-2014-0010 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/lingty-2014-0010>
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