[Lingtyp] PhD Studentship--Surrey Morphology Group

[Matthew Baerman]

Dear Colleagues

The Surrey Morphology Group is offering a PhD studentship on project about analogy in morphological change, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Please pass this on to any potentially interested parties! Advert follows:

The staggering diversity of the world's languages is the cumulative effect of small-scale evolutionary processes. One such process is analogy, where speakers notice patterns in their language and extend them to new environments. Understanding analogy is crucial to understanding both how our languages came to be the way they are - i.e. the pathways of change underpinning individual language systems - and why, since analogical change reveals the assumptions and biases of human beings learning from incomplete and sometimes self-contradictory language data. The recipient of this studentship will contribute to a multidisciplinary project using innovative computational and statistical techniques to produce a predictive model of analogy, a missing puzzle piece in a complete theory of language change.

The student will be responsible for conducting a case study into morphological change in the history of a specific language. They will design their own project using the dataset they have collected, developing research questions and hypotheses relating to the theme of analogy in morphological change. Relevant topics for investigation could include (but are not limited to) questions such as: What effect do sociolinguistic conditions (e.g. language contact, adult learning, language death/attrition) have on the range of possibilities for analogical extension? Are there any morphosyntactic or lexical constraints on syncretism that reveal themselves diachronically? Under what circumstances is inflectional overabundance (meaningless variation in forms within paradigms) stable or unstable over time?

The studentship is part of the project Predicting language evolution: Analogy in morphological change, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The student will be supervised by Professor Matthew Baerman, Dr Oliver Bond and Dr Helen Sims-Williams, and will work and receive training in the vibrant research environment of the Surrey Morphology Group, alongside leading researchers on inflectional morphology.

For further details and how to apply, see https://www.surrey.ac.uk/fees-and-funding/studentships/predicting-language-evolution-analogy-morphological-change

Closing date for applications: 31st January 2023


Matthew Baerman
Surrey Morphology Group
University of Surrey
Guildford
Surrey
GU2 7XH

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20221026/f27ca2a6/attachment.htm>