3 PhD Candidates at the Utrecht University

You will be participating in the project Microcontact: Language variation and change from the Italian heritage perspective (MICROCONTACT). This project is funded by the European Research Council (ERC), by way of a Consolidator Grant awarded to the principal investigator (PI) Dr Roberta D’Alessandro, Professor of Syntax and Language Variation at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. The project aims to develop a theory of syntactic change in contact, by observing how specific syntactic structures react to contact with very similar structures in Romance sister languages. The main object of investigation are heritage Italian languages in the Americas in contact with other Romance varieties. Italian heritage languages in the Americas offer a unique combination of wide diachronic written documentation and multiple contact with other, minimally different, languages, which will allow us to investigate change while it is still happening. We will collect linguistic data of first-generation speakers, i.e. Italians that moved to the Americas between the 1940s and the 1960, as well as their peers who stayed behind at the time and came into extensive contact with Italian. The languages investigated are Abruzzese, Neapolitan, Piedmontese, Salentino, Sicilian, Tuscan and Veneto in contact with French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian (and English as a control group).

In this project, three PhD positions and a Postdoc position (advertised separately) will be available for the following subprojects:
PhD1 – Person-driven auxiliaries and differential object marking in contact
PhD2 – Deixis in contact: pronouns, determiners, adjectives and adverbs
PhD3 – Subject clitics in contact

Deadline Application: 25-02-2017

Further details:
3 PhD Candidates at the Utrecht University