Ref. nr.: 2018/2003

One Doctoral Research Fellowship (PhD) within Linguistics (Cognitive Linguistics: Empirical Approaches to Russian) is available in the Department of Language and Culture at the University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway (UiT). The position is affiliated with the CLEAR research group, Cognitive Linguistics: Empirical Approaches to Russian.

The appointment is a fixed term position for a period of four years.

The purpose of the PhD Research Fellowship is research training leading to the successful completion of a doctoral dissertation to be defended publically. The candidate will be affiliated with the Faculty's organised research training, and the academic work must result in a doctoral thesis aiming to obtain the degree of PhD within the period of employment. Admission to a PhD programme is a prerequisite for employment, and the programme period starts on commencement of the position.

The successful candidate must meet the requirements for admission to the Faculty’s PhD program, cf. § 6 of UiT PhD regulations. Moreover, the applicant must prove English language proficiency equivalent to the standards of Norwegian Higher Education Entrance Qualification, see PhD Regulations UiT.

For more information, see also uit.no/hsl/phd.

For further information about the position (and the project), please contact:

• Professor Laura A. Janda, email: laura.janda@uit.no or
• Head of Department Eystein Dahl, phone +47 77 64 42 90, email: eystein.dahl@uit.no

Affiliation

The position is affiliated with the Department of Language and Culture (ISK). The Department consists of 75 permanent employees, 10 adjunct professors, and approximately 30 PhD fellows. Additionally, the Department has approximately 35 temporary research and teaching positions. The Department’s core activates are research, teaching, and dissemination within linguistics, literature, art history, and media and documentation studies.

The Department has a very active and diverse research profile. It houses one of the world’s most excellent research communities in linguistics, with research groups within cognitive linguistics (CLEAR), Sami language technology (Giellatekno and Divvun), socio-linguistics (LAIDUA), language acquisition (LAVA), and theoretical linguistics (CASTL-FISH). The Department’s research communities within literature, art history, and media and documentation studies are nationally highly competitive, and are organised into research groups such as Health Art Society (HAS), Russian Space, WARGAME and ALMPUB.

ISK offers one-year programmes, as well as full Bachelor and Master programmes in the following fields: General linguistics, literature, art history, media and documentation studies, English, Kven, Finnish, Norwegian, Russian, Sami, Spanish, and German. It also offers PhD education within cultural/literary studies, art history, media and documentation studies, and linguistics.

CLEAR is an active and productive research group, currently consisting of 6 researchers, including two professors, one associate professor, one postdoc, and two PhD students. The group members are involved in a number of research projects both locally and internationally, and many projects have received external funding, e.g. “Exploring Emptiness” (investigating the meanings of prefixes and suffixes in Russian), “Neat Theories, Messy Realities” (investigating traditional definitions of linguistic terms such as allomorphy in the light of corpus data) and “Birds and Beasts” (investigating the evolution of aspectual categories in Russian) projects financed by the Research Council of Norway and the Time Is Space (investigating how temporal concepts are expressed in Russian) project financed by the Centre for Advanced Study of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences, in addition to multiple grants from the Senter for Internasjonalisering av Utdanning (SIU). For further information about the group’s work and activities, see the website of the CLEAR research group: https://en.uit.no/forskning/forskningsgrupper/gruppe?p_document_id=344365. The CLEAR group also collaborates with the Sami language technology research group at UiT (Giellatekno and Divvun).

The appointed Doctoral Research Fellow must have her/his daily workplace at UiT, campus Tromsø.

The position’s field of research/research project and other duties

This position is connected to the Russian Construction project at UiT. This subproject, titled “Family Ties”, addresses the relations and rivalry within families of grammatical constructions – sets of closely related sentence patterns. This project involves research from both theoretical and pedagogical perspectives and is organically integrated into the Learner’s Constructicon of Russian, part of a multinational project co-led by the CLEAR (Cognitive Linguistics: Empirical Approaches to Russian) research group at UiT. The current version of the Russian Constructicon can be accessed here: https://spraakbanken.gu.se/karp/#?mode=konstruktikon-rus.

Construction grammar makes two fundamental claims: 1) the construction (a form-meaning pairing, at any level of complexity) is the relevant unit of linguistic analysis, and 2) a language is a structured aggregate network of constructions, also known as a “constructicon”. Goldberg (2006) additionally observed that grammatical constructions can be grouped as “families” that share syntactic, semantic, and lexical properties. These bold claims have not yet been fully realized in terms of linguistic analysis: attempts to describe the entire constructicon of specific languages have only recently been launched, and the identification of family networks within a given constructicon is in its infancy. Investigation of the families of constructions is essential because these networks ultimately structure the constructicon. In other words, modeling a constructicon as a list of constructions misses the inherent structure that holds the whole language together.

This position will use the Russian Constructicon as a starting point for developing a classification of Russian grammatical constructions based on their semantics, syntax, and anchor words, and will analyze families of constructions according to various unifying characteristics, such as constructions with numerals, constructions with prohibitive meanings, or constructions that select Perfective vs. Imperfective aspect.

This position will also contribute to ongoing work on the Russian Constructicon and the Strategic Mastery of Russian Word Forms Tool (the SMARTool). The SMARTool is inspired by the observation that only 1-3 wordforms of any given lexeme are actually common in Russian. The SMARTool will provide a learning environment that focuses on the highest frequency wordforms of the highest frequency words, supplied with the grammatical constructions and collocations that motivate the use of these wordforms.

A 6-12 months stay at a university abroad is encouraged.

Applicants for the advertised Doctoral position should propose a research project. The project proposal should be 5-10 pages.

Qualification requirements

The position requires a Master’s degree in Russian Linguistics.

For more information, see also: Supplementary regulations HSL.

Personal suitability will be emphasised.

Working conditions

The normal period of employment is four years. The nominal length of the PhD programme is three years. The fourth year, distributed as 25 % of each year, is reserved for teaching or other academic duties within the university. Please consult PhD Regulations UiT for further information. The position will especially be assigned teaching duties within Russian Linguistics.

A shorter period of appointment may be decided upon if the applicant has already completed parts of his/her research training programme or if the appointment is based on a previous qualifying position (PhD Candidate, research assistant, or the like) in such a way that the research training amounts to a total of three years.

The successful candidate must be willing to engage him/herself in the ongoing development of their discipline and the university as a whole.

Remuneration for the position of PhD Candidate is in accordance with the State salary scale

code 1017. A compulsory contribution of 2 % to the Norwegian Public Service Pension Fund will be deducted.

Application

The application must be submitted electronically via the application form available on www.jobbnorge.no.

Applications by e-mail are not accepted.

The application must include the following attachments:

• letter of application
• project description. Please see further information concerning the template for project project description
• CV (containing a complete overview of education, supervised professional training and professional work)
• diploma and transcript of records from Bachelor’s degree or equivalent
• diploma and transcript of records from Master’s degree or equivalent
• diploma supplement for other completed degrees
• documentation of English language proficiency
• list of 2-3 academic referees, including contact details (name, relation to applicant, e-mail address and phone number)
  • author(s), title of work
  • for articles: the name of the journal and volume, first and last page of the article, year of publication
  • for book or other independent publications: publisher, place of print, year of publication, number of pages
• Master`s Thesis
• other works (published or unpublished) which the applicant wishes to be taken into consideration during the assessment process and a description of these. The list of works should contain the following information:

All documentation must be certified and translated into English or a Scandinavian language in order to be assessed.

Information and material to be considered during the assessment must be submitted within the stipulated deadline.

Assessment

The applicants will be assessed by an expert committee. During this assessment process, emphasis will be attached to the applicant’s potential for research as shown by:

• Master’s Thesis or equivalent
• other academic works, and
• project description

In addition, consideration may be given to work experience or other activities of significance for the implementation of the PhD research. This includes teaching education, teaching experience, experience from popular outreach and experience/education from other types of dissemination.

The best qualified applicants will be selected for interviews. The interview shall among other things aim to clarify the applicant’s personal suitability for the position.

Other information

Applicants shall also refer to the supplementary regulations for appointment to postdoktor (postdoctoal Research Fellow), stipendiat (PhD) and vitenskapelige assistent (Research Assistant) positions at the UiT and to the http://www.uhr.no/documents/Regulations_Post_doctoral_and_research_fellow.pdf

Questions concerning the organisation of the working environment, such as the physical state of the place of employment, health service, possibility for flexible working hours, part time, etc. as well as questions about the PhD programme may be directed to the telephone reference in this announcement.

UiT’s HR policy objectives emphasises diversity, and encourages all qualified applicants to apply regardless of gender, functional ability and national or ethnic background.

UiT is an IW (Inclusive Workplace) enterprise, and will make the necessary adaptations in order to facilitate for employees with reduced functional ability.

Personal data given in an application or CV will be processed in accordance with the Act relating to the processing of personal data (the Personal Data Act). In accordance with Section 25 subsection 2 of the Freedom of Information Act, the applicant may request not to be registered on the public list of applicants. However, the University may nevertheless decide to publish the applicant’s name. The applicant will receive advance notification in the event of such publication.

Apply for position

Søknadsfrist: 20.08.2018

Web: www.uit.no

Kontakt: Professor Laura A. Janda

E-post: laura.janda@uit.no

Kontakt 2: Eystein Dahl (Head of Department)Telefon: +47 77 64 42 90

E-post: eystein.dahl@uit.no