Fully funded PhD studentship on predictability in Romance verbal inflection

The project seeks to measure the amount of information available to speakers when they make inferences about the shape of inflected words. For example, English speakers can guess that the past tense of a new verb like "glorp" might be "glorped", following the same pattern as "jump" / "jumped". This raises fundamental questions about how languages work: how hard it is to make these predictions across languages? What language structures help, and how do they vary? Do languages become more predictable over time? To answer these questions, the project will innovate new computational tools able to measure the information available to speakers when they predict forms and apply them to comparable datasets. 

The PhD position is focused on Romance languages, for which ample data already exists, and the diachrony of which is well known. This will allow for a deep dive into the synchronic and diachronic properties of predictability. The PhD candidate will have the opportunity to collaborate with members of the project involved in developing the methodology and data and answering the questions in other families. 

The position is based at the University of Surrey, within the Surrey Morphology Group (SMG). In addition to the collaborative activities within the project, the successful candidate will benefit from the research environment of the SMG, a world-leading centre for research on morphological theory, typology and description.

The successful candidates will be selected on the basis of the following criteria:

• Excellent overall performance at undergraduate level
• Expertise in morphological description and analysis
• Familiarity with Romance linguistics
• Ability to meet the English language entry requirements for the PhD Linguistics
• Willingness to learn the technical aspects of the computational methodology (but no prior expertise needed).

Surrey Morphology Group