Institution/Organization: Université Paris Cité
Department: Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle
Web Address: www.llf.cnrs.fr

Level: PhD

Duties: Research

Specialty Areas: Semantics
Required Language(s): French (fra)

Description:

PhD studentship in Formal Linguistics

Duration: 36 months
Beginning: Fall 2023 (ideally October 2023)
Place: ATILF, From syntax to discourse axis (Nancy) and Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle (Paris)
Salary (net): approx. 1750 euros per month

Thesis supervisors: Mathilde Dargnat (Université de Lorraine and ATILF-CNRS, http://mathilde.dargnat.free.fr/), Jonathan Ginzburg (Labratoire de Linguistique Formelle, Université Paris-Cité, https://sites.google.com/site/jonathanginzburgswebsite/home)

Prerequisites:
- Masters in Linguistics, Cognitive Science, or NLP,
- Excellent command of French, and
- A solid background in formal or/and computational semantics would be advantageous.

To apply, include the following in your application to the contact below:
- CV of at most 2 pages,
- Transcripts for Masters and BSc/BA degrees,
- A letter of motivation,
- Masters thesis (or a draft thereof) and/or any submitted/accepted publications, and
- Contact details for one or two referees.

The CODIM project's short description can be found here: https://www.codim-project.org/

The CODIM project is funded by the A(gence) N(ationale) de la R(echerche). It focuses on two important linguistic resources that contribute to structuring monologues or conversations in human languages : D(iscourse) M(arkers) (therefore/donc, well/ben,bon etc. in English/French) and prosody (in particular, intonation). It will evaluate their status with respect to two major views on how complex meanings emerge: compositionality (the possibility of combining meaningful expressions into more complex meaningful expressions) and pattern- or construction-based approaches (the idea that language users exploit partly ‘frozen’ strings of words). We will compare the semantic and prosodic properties of simple and complex French DM (e.g. ah + bon) found in corpora for written and spoken French, using a variety of technical tools for DM identification (category-driven text mining), clustering (statistics and machine learning) and research in formal semantics and prosody (duration and intensity measures, contour representation). The project aims at fostering collaboration between linguists and computer scientists.

Dissertation Topic: French discourse markers and compositionality.

The dissertation will focus on providing a semantic and pragmatic characterization of a class of DM combinations. This involves issues including the following research questions:
1. When are the DMs in a markedly frequent combination and are intuitively close, accounting for the fact that their combination is not perceived to be redundant (e.g., donc du coup, alors donc, mais pourtant, mais quand même, et alors, donc voilà,)?
2. When the DMs are intuitively quite distinctive, are they just complementary, which suggests that they introduce unconnected discourse relations/speaker manifestations? Or is another type of analysis needed?
3. Is the combination compositional? Addressing this question requires discussing and possibly elaborating on existing compositional techniques. For instance, current formal approaches in semantics are functional in an elementary mathematical sense: functions apply to arguments (which can themselves be functions) to deliver ‘interpretations’. Can one reduce the observed combinations to this type of mechanism? Also, in cases where such a reduction is possible, to what extent can it predict or motivate the strength of association between the DMs which cluster into the combination? Why is this particular association more frequent than others? Does it correspond, for example, to specific discourse moves which play a prominent role in interactions?
4. Are there cases of repulsion (DMs which do not occur together)? How come?

Application Deadline: 25-Jun-2023

Contact Information:
Prof Jonathan Ginzburg
[email protected]