A postdoctoral research associate position is available at the University of Cambridge in conjunction with the ESRC-funded research project 'Investigating the diffusion of morphosyntactic innovations using social media'.

The project aims to develop the use of social-media data (e.g. Twitter) for the study of language variation and change, in particular the question of how morphosyntactic innovations diffuse through geographic space. The successful candidate will be responsible for creating corpora of social-media data in the three languages of investigation (British English, Norwegian and Welsh) and for developing theoretically informed and computationally sophisticated tools to analyse patterns of variation found within the corpora in collaboration with other team members. The ideal candidate will have a demonstrable background in both computational linguistics and in historical linguistics or language variation and change.

Candidates must have submitted their PhD in a Linguistics, Computer Science or another relevant field by the time of appointment; if they have not yet been awarded their PhD they will initially be appointed as a Research Assistant (salary £25,298-£29,301), and be promoted to Research Associate (salary £31,076-£38,183) on award of their PhD).

This position is 100% FTE with a fixed term of 36 months, starting 1 September 2017 or as soon as possible thereafter.

The successful candidate will be report to Dr David Willis in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics.

Salary will normally rise annually by one point on the anniversary of appointment.

The appointment is subject to satisfactory completion of a probationary period of 6 months.

To apply online for this vacancy and to view further information about the role, please visit: http://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/14345. This will take you to the role on the University’s Job Opportunities pages. There you will need to click on the 'Apply online' button and register an account with the University's Web Recruitment System (if you have not already) and log in before completing the online application form.

In order for your application to be considered, please upload a covering letter, a detailed curriculum vitae, a list of publications and one sample of a recent publication. You must also provide the names and contact details of two referees who are familiar with your work in the relevant field and whom we can contact for a reference once the vacancy has closed.

The closing date is midnight (BST) on Sunday 13 August 2017. Interviews are expected to be held on the week commencing 21 August 2017.

Please quote reference GZ12741 on your application and in any correspondence about this vacancy.

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