Job Location: France
Job Title: Call for applications for invited professors - International Chair 2026 - France
Job Rank: Professor, Researcher

Specialty Areas: General Linguistics

Description:

The inIdEx project “Empirical Foundations of Linguistics” EFL is a project funded by the IdEx Université Paris Cité for 6 years (2025-2030). It gathers 11 research teams (ALTAE, HTL, LLF, INCC, CRLAO, Lacito, Lattice, LIPN, Llacan, LPP, SeDyl) from 4 partner universities (U. Paris Cité, U. Sorbonne Nouvelle, U. Sorbonne Paris Nord et Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO)). The aim of the EFL project is to promote innovative and interdisciplinary research within Linguistics and related fields. Specific interest is given to empirical foundations (corpus analysis and experimental methods) of linguistic research.

Up to 3 applicants will be selected for the 2026 International EFL Chair. They are expected to give a series of four lectures presenting innovative research in one of the fields of the EFL project (listed below). He/she will be supported by a member of the EFL project and the EFL project manager with respect to the scientific and practical organisation of their stay in Paris.

Eligible candidates are professors or researchers (tenured or not), affiliated to a foreign research unit, willing to deliver a two-hour weekly seminar on a research topic contributing to the EFL project within a period of 4 weeks during the year 2026. The seminars can be given in French or in English. They will be recorded and broadcast on the EFL project website.

The EFL project will cover the following expenses : transport (economic class), accommodation and meals.

Applications, written either in French or English, should include:
- A curriculum vitae with a list of publications
- A one-page summary with detail of the four intended seminars and a general title for the entire course.
- The dates of availability and intended length of stay in Paris (not less than 4 weeks).
- The name of the research unit in the EFL project that will host the professor and the name of the professor/researcher who will be his/her correspondent in the host research unit (please take formal contact with him/her before applying).

Deadline for applications: August 25th, 2025 (11.59 pm, Paris time)

Applications should be sent to Christel Préterre, EFL project manager ([email protected]) and Ioana Chitoran, EFL coordinator ([email protected]).

EFL Workpackages

1. Growing up, getting old : Language processing across the lifespan
Throughout the various stages of life, from infancy to old age, individuals experience important changes in their language abilities. We will study the complexities and mechanisms behind these changes using an interdisciplinary approach combining linguistics, psycholinguistics, developmental psychology, neuroscience, clinical phonetics, at behavioral and neural levels. We will explore issues related to language acquisition, early linguistic or non-linguistic communication, language abilities in aging and behavior/brain plasticity, including atypical language development and associated pathologies in aging.

2. Bilingualism, multilingualism, and contact languages
Most people speak and understand more than one language, making monolingualism the exception rather than the rule. Growing up or living in an environment where multiple languages are spoken has consequences from cognitive processes of the individual starting at prenatal stages to complex societal questions in multilingual communities. We will study speakers of various pairs of languages, including bimodal speakers of spoken and signed languages. Our interdisciplinary approach will allow us to address:
- the representation of two or more languages in the human brain
- language mixing and blending in multilingual societies
- contact-induced variation and its typological outputs in diachrony

3. Language variation and change
Languages vary over time, across regions and across speakers. Increased language contact in a globalized world yields both more standardization and faster spreading innovations. We will study language variation and change documenting phonetic, lexical, syntactic, semantic variation across related and unrelated languages, exploring the trigger factors (e.g., language structures, cognitive processing factors, social factors, modalities, registers, genres).

4. Language and AI
Computational linguistics and AI have been strongly influenced by recent technological developments in deep learning and large language models, such as chatGPT, GPT-4. In the context of this paradigm shift, we will study the potential of these new models, in both speech and textual modalities, to:
- better understand and document properties of human languages
- better understand the new language models, their limits, their alternatives
- study applications of LLMs, including applications for society

5. Linguistic diversity as a testing ground for theories of language
Empirical research has revealed a nuanced view of what languages may or may not share. Through innovative cooperation within the EFL community, we will test theories of language within and beyond linguistics on the largest possible set of languages in all modalities, using computational, corpus, experimental methods. We will focus on:
- Limits of linguistic diversity: How different can languages be in all of their dimensions?
- Grammar and its limits: How does conventionalized linguistic knowledge interact with other sources of knowledge in shaping languages?
- The word as a basic unit of linguistic analysis: How crucial is the notion of word to understanding the structure of languages?

6. Language in its social context
Social context will be systematically studied in the analysis of language phenomena which, in turn, inform social phenomena. We will analyze socially situated and socially meaningful language practices using indexical language resources from a sociolinguistic perspective (e.g., construction of gender, agentivity of individuals, power relations), addressing important social issues (e.g., human-environment links in the age of the anthropocene, linguistic diversity at the level of families, towns or states in connection to migration, social justice, inclusion).

Application Deadline: 25-Aug-2025
Email Address for Applications: [email protected]
Contact Information:
Christel Préterre
Email: [email protected]