PROJECTS

PhD position

The Department of English and American Studies at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena invites applications for a PhD position in the area of comparative corpus linguistics. The position will be situated in the project 'Bimodal corpus-based language comparison. A study of connectives of contingency in European languages', funded by the German Science Foundation. The successful candidate is expected to hold a degree in General or English linguistics or a related field (e.g. Romance or Slavic Studies, Computational linguistics). They should ideally have experience working with (multilingual) corpora and at least basic programming skills (R, Python). For more information, please see the project description below and do not hesitate to contact me at volker.gast@uni-jena.de for further information.

Deadline: 10 July, 2023

Start date: open until filled

Salary: according to the TV-L salary scale (65%), see for instance this document

Time of employment: 36 months

Project description

The project deals with connectives expressing a conditional, causal or concessive relation, such as English `if, `because' and `although'. We use a bimodal translation corpus (EPTIC-J) to study the use and distribution of relevant connectives in twenty European national languages. The EPTIC-J corpus contains transcripts of speeches delivered in the European Parliament as well as their simultaneous interpretations and written translations into the other languages of the European Union. This corpus design allows us to examine connectives in terms of their distribution in the original language as well as cross-linguistic correspondences reflected in the (offline/written as well as simultaneous/spoken) translations. Contingency connectives are interpretatively complex, insofar as they have a truth-functional interpretation and at the same time trigger communicative effects at the level of discourse and argumentation. The main questions of the project are (i) how aspects of meaning at different levels of interpretation map onto aspects of linguistic form (distribution of subordinators and linear arrangement of sentences), and (ii) what degrees of cognitive load are associated with particular connectives and the relations they express. To answer question (i), we use only the written part of the corpus. For question (ii), we rely on the interpretation data, using the choice of a translation option and the `ear-voice-span' (EVS/décalage) as indicators of cognitive load. By applying a new methodology (bimodal comparative corpus analysis) to the study of a topic that has been treated from different perspectives (typology, sentence semantics, discourse/conversation and argumentation), in particular by integrating spoken data, we will look at generalizations made in previous work from a new perspective.

Completed projects