Research Excellence Academy PhD Studentship in Linguistics
Value of award:
The studentship includes the UK/EU rate of tuition fee and £14,296 living expenses per year (2016-17 Research Councils UK rate).
Number of awards: 1
Start date and duration:
January 2017 for 3 years, subject to satisfactory progress.
Application closing date:
31 October 2016.
Overview:
Applications are invited for a PhD studentship in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics (SELLL) at Newcastle University, funded from the university’s Research Excellence Academy Scheme.
The successful candidate will conduct research that focuses on and develops The Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE).
DECTE is a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews with residents of areas in North East England. It combines datasets from the 1970s and 1990s (first amalgamated in The Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English) with a monitor corpus containing interviews with diverse local informants that have been collected since 2007.
As of 2016, the complete DECTE archive contains more than 700 interviews, capturing around 1,200 informants in over five million words of text and 450 hours of audio. In terms of birth dates, it covers over 100 years, with the oldest speaker born in 1891 and the youngest in 1995. The coverage of the dataset is unrivalled by any similar resource in the UK.
DECTE has been used to address a range of research questions in phonetics/phonology, morphosyntax, discourse and computational linguistics. We invite applications for corpus-related projects in any appropriate linguistics discipline, such as phonetic/phonological variation, morphosyntactic/discourse pragmatic variation or lexical semantics, etc.
The successful applicant will join a thriving, energetic and creative research environment consisting of linguistics staff and research students not only in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics but also in the other schools that constitute Newcastle’s Centre for Research in Linguistics and Language Sciences.
Sponsor:
Newcastle University’s Research Excellence Academy.
Name of supervisors:
Dr Adam Mearns and Professor Karen Corrigan, School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics.
Additional supervisors with expertise in relevant linguistics disciplines could also be appointed from staff in School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics/ Centre for Research in Linguistics and Language Sciences, depending on the proposed topic of the PhD.
Eligibility Criteria:
The studentship is open to UK, EU and international applicants who propose to study for their PhD on a full-time basis.
Applicants must:
- Hold an excellent undergraduate degree and have completed or be completing a Master’s level qualification in a relevant subject
- Have original plans for a PhD project which matches our research strengths
- Meet our English language requirements if your first language is not English
- Be commencing their first year of a full-time PhD with the University in January 2017.
How to apply
You must apply through the University’s online postgraduate application form. Only mandatory fields need to be completed.
Include the following information:
- Insert the programme code 8190F in the programme of study section
- Select the research area Linguistics (Eng Lit, Lang and Linguistics).
- Insert the studentship code SEL13 in the studentship/partnership reference field
- Attach an academic CV of 1-2 pages and a 750 word research proposal
- attach degree transcripts* and certificates and, if English is not your first language, a copy of your English language qualification
- include the names and contact details of two referees.
*You will not be able to submit your application until you have submitted your degree transcript/s.
Contact
If you have any queries about the studentship, please email Dr Adam Mearns.
