Postdoctoral research fellow: The semantics of countability and pluralization

Contact: 
Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin, LLF
Contact email: 
carmen.sorin_at_linguist.jussieu.fr
University: 
Université Paris 7
Job rank: 
chercheur postdoctorant
Duration: 
12 months, starting dec. 2011/jan. 2012.
Salary: 
24 000 € net / year
Keywords: 
Syntax-Semantics interface, Formal Semantics, pluralities and quantification
Application deadline: 
2011/11/10
Application email: 
marandin_at_linguist.jussieu.fr
Application reference: 
EFL-PLU

Description

Applicants are invited to work in a 10-year project "Empirical foundations of linguistics". The candidate will work in Strand 2 : “Experimental Grammar in a cross linguistic perspective”.
This a full time position

Application

The successful applicant will have to document qualifications in
linguistics/psycholinguistics at the PhD level. S/he should have defended her PhD before December 1st 2011. Applicants will be assessed by an expert committee. The main emphasis of the assessment will be on the applicant's potential for research, as evident from: PhD thesis, other scholarly works and project description.
Application form will include:

  • updated CV;
  • the reference of two referents (with email address);
  • web address with publications.

Job description

The candidate will work on the analysis of the mass/count distinction, pluralities and quantification in several languages (Romance, with special emphasis on French, Italian, Romanian and Brazilian Portuguese), as well as typologically unrelated languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, Somali or Karitiana. Her task will be:  to help establishing and validate empirical generalizations in the test languages; to contribute to designing experiments that are meant to (i) ascertain the data (by testing grammaticality judgments in an online fashion) and (ii) to evaluate competing theories; to integrate the results of the (independently driven) psycholinguistic experiments within the theory that will be elaborated in the project. The ideal candidate should demonstrate previous experience on the subject, and an in-depth knowledge of formal semantics and the syntax-semantics interface. Knowledge of one or more of the languages involved in the project will be a plus.