PhD , Dutch morphology and constructicography

Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) invites applications for a fully funded PhD position within the NWO project ‘The Morphicon: A new gateway to morphological knowledge’.

The PhD in this project will work in a small team to build a morphological constructicon
for Dutch and use it to investigate the division of labour between grammatical regularity and lexical idiosyncrasy.

Constructicons are digital networks of grammatical constructions in a language. Such resources are being built for a variety of major languages, but not yet for Dutch. Moreover, existing constructicons all focus on syntactic constructions, neglecting morphology. The aim of this project is to develop the first morphological constructicon or “Morphicon” with Dutch as the target language. The resource will be developed by a team of three researchers—the PI, a Postdoc and the PhD—in collaboration with the Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal.

The PhD will participate in the team effort, but will also have their own research project.

The team will work together on transforming existing lexicographic and grammatical resources into a digital network. The network will consist of lexical constructions (simple and complex words) and grammatical constructions (word-formation patterns), linked to one another by the properties they share. An important part of the work will be to find, test and develop digital tools to assist in classification, annotation and network building.

The specific research project of the PhD will target the interplay between grammatical regularity and lexical idiosyncracy in morphological constructions. To this aim, the PhD will investigate a set of selected constructional families in greater depth to assess the proportion and nature of idiosyncrasy within each family.

This PhD position is part of an NWO-funded Open Competition Large project involving PI dr. Jenny Audring (Leiden University) and external partner prof. dr. Sjef Barbiers (Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal).

• Extracting word-formation patterns from the existing descriptive literature and encoding them in systematic constructional schemas;
• Matching complex words to the appropriate schemas and subschemas and annotating them in such a way that the inventory of constructions can be transformed into a network;
• Assisting in finding, testing and evaluating digital tools, including LLMs, to aid classification, annotation and network building;
• Investigating Dutch morphological constructions quantitatively and qualitatively;
• Presenting (joint) research results at workshops and conferences;
• Publishing (joint) research results and writing a PhD-thesis within the period of appointment;
• (Assisting in) teaching activities at bachelor level ;
• Participating in (the organisation of) knowledge dissemination activities;
• Participating in meetings and training sessions of the project research group.

• A Master’s degree in linguistics, completed before the start date;
• Demonstrable interest in grammar, especially morphology, from a descriptive and/or theoretical perspective;
• Native or near-native proficiency of Dutch and a good command of academic English;
• Excellent research and analytical…