PhD Opportunities: The Wellsprings of Linguistic Diversity

PhD positions are available at ANU, working with a team of people investigating diversity and cultural evolution.  The call is below:

Applications are now being sought for three PhD positions on the project ‘The Wellsprings of Linguistics Diversity’, funded by the Australian Research Council for the period mid-2014 to mid-2019.

Each PhD position will undertake substantial fieldwork on variation in a particular speech community: Western Arnhem Land (Bininj Gun-wok and neighbouring areas), Vanuatu (Sa and adjoining languages, South Pentecost Island), and Samoa (Samoan). Support will include a four-year stipend ($29,844 p/a), generous fieldwork funding, and embedding of the doctoral research in the dynamic team setting of the project, as well as the newly established ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language.  Positions will start in early February 2015.

The project is led by Prof. Nick Evans and the project team including postdocs Dr Murray Garde, Dr Ruth Singer, and Dr Dineke Schokkin and doctoral scholar Eri Kashima (fieldworkers), postdoc Dr Mark Ellison (computational modelling), and consultants Profs. Miriam Meyerhoff and Catherine Travis (variationist sociolinguistics) and Emeritus Prof. Andy Pawley (Samoan).

The project’s goal is to understand the causes of why linguistic diversity evolves differentially in different parts of the world, through a combination of detailed sociolinguistic case-studies of small-scale speech communities in their anthropological setting, and computational modelling of how micro-variation engenders macro-variation over iterations of transmission. The three high-diversity field sites are western Arnhem Land (Bininj Gun-wok and neighbouring languages), Morehead district of Southern New Guinea (Nen, Nambu, Idi), and South Pentecost Island, Vanuatu (Sa and neighbouring languages).  Samoa (Samoan) supplies a low-diversity comparator to the Vanuatu, and controls from small speech communities in global languages (English and Spanish) will be obtained by other investigators on the project.

A fuller description of the project can be downloaded from http://chl.anu.edu.au/school/laureate.php

General information about the doctoral program in School of Culture, History and Language at the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific can be found at http://chl.anu.edu.au/school/students_phd.php

Specific enquiries should be directed to Nick Evans (nicholas.evans@anu.edu.au) and completed application dossiers sent to geoff.sjollema@anu.edu.au. Completed applications should include the following information:
(a)    CV with educational qualifications, any publications and other relevant experience (e.g. fieldwork, relevant internships)
(b)    a two-page statement setting out your preferred field site or sites, what skills and personal attributes you will bring to the project, and what you see as the most interesting and challenging issues you will need to solve
(c)    if available, other materials supporting your case (e.g. relevant articles or other materials)

Deadline:  Aug 3rd 2014, midnight, AEST

Once awards are made, successful applicants will be notified and then guided through making a formal application for enrolment status through the regular ANU system.