The Surrey Morphology Group in the School of English and Languages, University of Surrey, is offering a three-year PhD scholarship as part of the project ‘Morphological Complexity in Nuer’, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research (UK). Joint supervisors will be Dr Matthew Baerman and Dr Oliver Bond at the University of Surrey, and Dr Bert Remijsen at the University of Edinburgh. The expected start date is 1 April 2015.
Vacancy: https://jobs.surrey.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx?ref=073614
The project involves a detailed description of the inflectional morphology of Nuer, a West Nilotic (Nilo-Saharan) language spoken in South Sudan and Ethiopia. The complexity of the system presents a real descriptive challenge, compounded by the wealth of prosodic features (vowel length, tone and phonation type) that play a crucial role in inflection. The PhD will focus on a description of verbal inflection, which forms a well-defined subsystem that will provide the key to unravelling the phonological and morphological components of Nuer inflection in general. The research will involve collection of data from speakers, as well as its phonological and morphological analysis. Data elicitation will involve speakers both in the UK and in Ethiopia, which will require periodic field trips in the course of the project.
The Surrey Morphology Group '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.
Surrey Morphology Group: http://www.surrey.ac.uk/smg
Funding information
The PhD is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research (UK), and is subject to their conditions. AHRC studentship funding is only available to Home or EU students. Both Home and EU students have to satisfy the standard research council eligibility criteria.
The AHRC eligibility criteria, the terms and conditions of grants and monitoring arrangements are set out in their ‘Student Funding Guide’ 2014-15. This should be read in conjunction with the RCUK ‘Terms and Conditions of Training Grants’ and ‘Training Grant Guide’. All three documents can be found at: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/Funding-Opportunities/Postgraduate-funding/Pages/Current-award-holders.aspx
EU students who have not been resident in the UK for the 3 years preceding the award (April 1 2015) will be entitled to a Fees Only award.
Applicant criteria
The applicants should have a good Master’s degree (equivalent of first-class distinction) and a strong background in a relevant area of linguistics, such as language description, linguistic fieldwork, phonological analysis and morphological analysis. Experience with with Nilotic languages or other languages of the region would also be a plus.
Application
Please send a cover letter explaining your interest in and qualifications for the project, a CV, and the names and contact details of two references. Applications should be sent by e-mail to Penny Everson (p.everson@surrey.ac.uk) by 8 December 2015. Informal enquiries may be made to Dr Matthew Baerman (m.baerman@surrey.ac.uk) or Dr Oliver Bond (o.bond@surrey.ac.uk).
