The School of English and Languages is seeking to appoint an academic to a Fixed-Term contract (14 months) in the Surrey Morphology Group (SMG) as a postdoctoral researcher in the AHRC project “Combining gender and classifiers in natural languages”. The project directors are Prof. Greville G. Corbett, Prof. Dunstan Brown and Dr Matthew Baerman, and project consultants are Prof. Maria Polinsky, Prof. Gunter Senft and Dr Sebastian Fedden. The successful candidate will be responsible for conducting research on the role of gender and classifiers in reference tracking in text corpora. Under investigation are: a language with both gender and classifiers (Mian, Papuan), a language with only gender (Italian, Indo-European), a language with only classifiers (Kilivila, Austronesian), and a language where there is no clearly identifiable set for either of these (Yup'ik, Eskimo-Aleut). The successful candidate will have a research background in categorization and/or nominal classification, or knowledge and skills relevant for the in-depth study of these. Previous experience of working on reference tracking in text corpora is highly desirable. Candidates must have the ability to work independently while functioning as part of a research team. The position is available from 1 January 2015.

The SMG's current research ranges from fieldwork (on Daghestanian, Oto-Manguean, Slavonic, Atlantic, Papuan and Tibeto-Burman languages) to morphological theory (especially Network Morphology), linguistic typology (including Canonical Typology) and computational modelling. At School level, the School of English and Languages offers a collaborative and successful research environment, and within this, the SMG has research projects funded by the European Research Council, the AHRC and the ESRC.

Informal enquiries may be made to Dr Matthew Baerman (m.baerman@surrey.ac.uk) or Professor Greville Corbett (g.corbett@surrey.ac.uk).