University or Organization: Saarland University
Department: Department of German Language and Literature (Fachrichtung Germanistik)
Job Location: Saarbrücken, Saarland, Germany
Web Address: https://www.uni-saarland.de/fachrichtung/germanistik.html
Job Title: Academic research assistant (m/f/x)
Job Rank: Post Doc

Specialty Areas: Historical Linguistics; Syntax

Required Language(s): German (deu)

Description:

We are inviting applications for a postdoctoral researcher position in our project: "Information Management as a Factor for Syntactic Variation in the History of German” (Principal investigators: Augustin Speyer, UdS, and Stefanie Dipper, RUB). The project is part of Saarland University’s Collaborative Research Center 1102 "Information Density and Linguistic Encoding”, which examines the extent to which Information Theory can contribute to a unifying model of language use, variation and change. This is a fixed-term position with a duration until June 30, 2026.

The goal of our project is to investigate what role do information-theoretic concepts play for the explanation of syntactic variation in German, both historic and contemporary. To investigate the impact of these factors, C6 uses corpus-linguistic methods, especially syntactic and information-structural annotation, and surprisal measurements such as DORM. Details regarding the project can be found here: https://sfb1102.uni-saarland.de/projects/information-management-as-a-factor-for-syntactic-variation/.

The tasks of the researcher include:
- the analysis of word order variation in German (e.g. serialization of objects relative to each other and relative to adjuncts) in historical and modern texts, especially taking information structure and surprisal into account,
- the production and analysis of information density profiles in order to investigate syntactic changes,
- the production and analysis of a corpus of variants, consisting of systematic changes of linguistic parameters to natural texts, in order to test information structural and information theoretical hypotheses,
- cooperation with other projects in the CRC using experimental methods,
- supervision and guidance of student research assistants and coordination of project related tasks within the research team.

Saarland University offers a lively academic environment that is famous for its interdisciplinary research in language, translation, computation and cognition. In CRC 1102, we entertain active collaborative links with the Department of Computer Science, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems and the German Institute for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI).

Your academic qualifications:
- Employment requirement is a relevant PhD (in Linguistics, German Language or a related subject). Note that we are happy to receive applications by people who have not yet finished their PhD by the time of application. A doctorate is required for employment.
- Language skills (according to GER): English C2, German C2

The successful candidate will also be expected to have:
- Profound knowledge of German syntax, especially with respect to information structure and constituent order
- Experience with corpus-linguistic methods and corpus data, especially historical German corpus data
- Acquaintance with information theoretic concepts such as Surprisal, UID is advantageous
- Programming skills (e.g. Python, R) for data analysis are also advantageous

We look forward to receiving your online application (in a PDF file) by 10 November 2024 to [email protected]. Please quote the reference number W2548 when applying, and use the phrase ‘application for Postdoc’ in the subject line of your e-mail. Applicants are requested to submit their application, together with an academic CV, a list of academic publications, copies of academic degree certificates and the contact details of two potential references.

Application Deadline: 10-Nov-2024
Mailing Address for Applications:
Prof.Dr. Augustin Speyer
Email Address for Applications: [email protected]
Web Address for Applications: https://www.uni-saarland.de/fakultaet-p/nds/team/speyer.html
Contact Information:
Prof.Dr. Augustin Speyer
Email: [email protected]
Phone: +49 (0)681 3023342