22.4906, Jobs: General Linguistics: Strategic Chair (Professor), U of Amsterdam

Wed Dec 7 23:04:11 UTC 2011

LINGUIST List: Vol-22-4906. Wed Dec 07 2011. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 22.4906, Jobs: General Linguistics: Strategic Chair (Professor), U of Amsterdam

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1)
Date: 06-Dec-2011
From: D. van der Vaart [D.vanderVaart at uva.nl]
Subject: General Linguistics: Strategic Chair (Professor), University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 07 Dec 2011 18:02:08
From: D. van der Vaart [D.vanderVaart at uva.nl]
Subject: General Linguistics: Strategic Chair (Professor), University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

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University or Organization: University of Amsterdam 
Department: Faculty of Humanities
Job Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands 
Web Address: http://www.hum.uva.nl
Job Rank: Professor  

Specialty Areas: General Linguistics 

Description:

The Faculty has a vacancy for a:
Strategic Chair (Professor) of Learnability of Human Languages
38 hours per week (for 5 years)
Vacancy number W11-230

This position stems from the Faculty of Humanities' decision to adopt Brain 
and Cognition as one of its three research priority areas for the next five 
years. The aim of the Brain and Cognition research priority area is to 
promote and deliver international, interdisciplinary, and leading-edge 
research in a rapidly evolving field of study.

The Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication carries out its 
research programme on Learnability within the context of this research 
priority area and gives a broad and novel interpretation to the notion of 
learnability, as a result of which it bridges research in a number of areas 
within linguistics, such as language acquisition, language change, and 
language typology. It does so by studying a number of related hypotheses. 
(1) The language data that children hear is impoverished, in the sense that 
(a) some crucial types of data may never appear in the child's input, (b) the 
data that does appear only gives superficial information about the 
structures that generated the data in the speaker's brain, and (c) the data 
will contain noise as a result of errors or ellipses by the speaker and as a 
result of imperfections in the transmission channels. On the basis of such 
impoverished input children will construct their own internal language. 
(2) When constructing their own language, the children will almost inevitably 
end up speaking somewhat differently from their parents and peers. Such 
changes will not only be apparent in the histories of single languages, but 
even more dramatically in second language acquisition (where learners 
start with an already present language system rather than from scratch) 
and in language creation processes such as creolization (where no single 
mother tongue is available). 
(3) By evoking change, learnability problems lead to typological variation 
between languages.

Given this set of hypotheses, the involvement of researchers with different 
types of orientations and research interests is necessary to come to grips 
with the issue of learnability in this wide sense. The ACLC is ideally placed 
to initiate this type of debate, as it is home to a highly diversified group of 
linguists, addressing linguistic issues from a wide variety of angles, and in a 
collaborative spirit.

Tasks:
The professor of learnability should, apart from bringing a relevant and 
innovative research agenda to the programme, bring researchers working 
on individual aspects of the learnability problem together, formulate new, 
broad research programmes in which these researchers can collaborate, 
and acquire funding for these programmes. The candidate to be appointed 
will thus play an important leadership role in the Learnability research 
programme, and will furthermore create a bridge between ACLC research 
and research carried out at the ILLC. The ILLC participates in the research 
focus area Brain and Cognition with its research programme on Cognitive 
modeling. Apart from her/his involvement in the research priority area, the 
candidate will play a prominent role in teaching courses and in curriculum 
development in the general area of Learnability and Linguistics and will be 
actively involved in PhD supervision. The candidate is furthermore 
expected to be an ambassador of the priority area and actively liaise and 
work with stakeholders both within and outside of the university sector.
See for further information: http://www.hum.uva.nl/aclc under Vacancies.

Application Deadline: 10-Jan-2012 
Mailing Address for Applications:
	prof. dr. J.W. van Henten 
	Spuistraat 210 
	Amsterdam 1012 VT 
	Netherlands  
Email Address for Applications: solliciteren2011-FGW at uva.nl 
Contact Information:
	dr D. van der Vaart 
	Email: D.vanderVaart at uva.nl 
	Phone: 0031205253804 

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