Linguapax
PhD Positions, University of Berne, Switzerland
Task:
Grammatical description of an endangered and hitherto undescribed or poorly documented language of the Indian subcontinent. The grammar will consist of an analytical description of the phonetics and phonology, morphology and morphosyntax, syntactic and pragmatic phenomena in the language and include a lexicon and morphologically analysed texts. The choice of languages will be made on the basis of the urgency of documentation in view of the degree of language endangerment, and the potential significance of the chosen language in terms of what light the language may shed on the phylogeny of its language family and on Asian population prehistory. The language description which will serve as the Ph.D. fellow's doctoral dissertation and represent a fundamental contribution to the field. The PhD fellow will conduct fieldwork in order to gather the corpus of language data which will form the basis of his or her description.
Requirements:
For our team we are looking for three highly motivated PhD students with sufficient linguistic qualifications for admission to the Bern PhD programme and relevant language competence. In addition to the benefit of expert supervision, the Ph.D. fellows will take part in fortnightly seminars and through their research may also participate in the Trans-Himalayan database project of the Bern Linguistic Laboratory.
Salary:
Salary scale is provided by the Swiss National Science Foundation
(http://www.snf.ch).
Application documents:
Please send the following items electronically:
- Your curriculum vitae (do not omit place and date of birth, nationality and
address, and also kindly include a photograph)
- Electronic copies of your master's thesis and bachelor's thesis
- Your list of publications, if any, as well as PDFs of these publications
- Scans of your diplomas
- A statement of proposed research
Application Deadline: 31-Jan-2012
Email Address for Applications: george.vandriem isw.unibe.ch
Contact Information:
Prof. George van Driem
Email: george.vandriem isw.unibe.ch
Phone: +41 31 631 80 06
Fax: +41 31 631 36 03