ERC Synergy Nilomorph PhD Scholarship: Describing West Nilotic Languages

The School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences is inviting applications for three postgraduate studentships that offer four years of funding and extensive associated resources. The topic of these positions is the investigation of the sound systems and grammars of understudied West Nilotic languages, in particular the Burun languages and Thuri. These studentships form part of a vibrant international research network involving researchers with a wide range of specialisations at several institutions, brought together by a shared interest in non-concatenative morphology, and funded by a Synergy grant from the European Research Council. The Nilomorph project sets out to explain how linguistic evolution took a highly unexpected turn in the West Nilotic languages of East Africa. Some languages within this group have evolved non-concatenative morphology, that is, a morphological system in which multiple grammatical categories are expressed simultaneously within a single syllable, through specifications of tone, phonation, vowel length and vowel quality. Within this wider project, the successful candidates will investigate the sound systems and grammars of understudied West Nilotic languages, in particular the Burun languages and Thuri, employing a combination of field linguistics, acoustic analysis, experimental linguistics, computational simulation, typology, and the historical-comparative method.