CRC1646: Linguistic Creativity in Communication

The newly established collaborative research centre CRC 1646 “Linguistic Creativity in Communication” at Bielefeld University, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), offers several positions, with a planned starting date of April 1, 2024 or later. The CRC 1646 investigates linguistic creativity in communication from a range of different perspectives.

The CRC has the following job openings:

• 30 PhD positions in various areas of expertise: 21 positions in linguistics (65 %),  1 position in literary studies (65 %), 1 position in philosophy (65 %), 2 positions in psychology (75 %), 5 positions in computational linguistics/computer science (100 %); deadline: Feb 15, 2024; short key: Wiss23780
  official announcement in English
  Stellenausschreibung auf Deutsch
  The positions described below refer to this announcement, unless indicated otherwise
• 1 PhD position in Law (Stellenausschreibung); short key: Wiss24032
• 5 Postdoc positions; deadline: Feb 26, 2024
  in project A02 (announcements: English / German); short key: Wiss23809
  in project C02 (announcements: English / German); short key: Wiss23811
  in project INF (announcements: English / German); short key: Wiss23807
  in project Ö (announcements: English / German); short key: Wiss23810
  in projects RTG/Z (announcements: English / German); short key: Wiss23812

 

Project A01 (Bárány/Hartmann) “Creativity in (morpho)syntactic variation: The role of analogy”

• Profile PhD position 1 (65%): The ideal candidate has a master in linguistics or a related field with a focus on (morpho-)syntax, ideally with a background in Hungarian.
• Profile PhD position 2 (65%): The ideal candidate has a master in linguistics or a related field with a focus on (morpho-)syntax, ideally with a background in Germanic languages.

Details project A01 including open positions (.pdf)

 

Project A02 (Cholin, Wagner, Zarrieß) "Creating novel phonetic representations across varying communication settings"

• PhD position 1 (65%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a master in linguistics or a related field, with a background in experimental psycholinguistics and interest in computational modeling.
• PostDoc position 2 (100%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a PhD in linguistics with a focus on phonetics or speech processing. The ideal candidate has experience in running phonetic experiments as well as a background in statistical/computational/psycholinguistic modeling.
  Official announcement (German / English)

Details project A02 including open positions (.pdf)

 

Project A03 (Hartmann, Jabeen, Wagner) "The creative listener: Interpretation at the interface of prosody, syntax and information structure"

• 2 PhD position (65%) Profile: The ideal candidates have a master in linguistics (or a related field) with a focus on phonetics/phonology, syntax or information structure.  Linguistic knowledge of Urdu or Hungarian is highly desirable.

Details project A03 including open positions (.pdf)

 

Project A04 (Vogel, Häussler) "Empirical profiles of grammatical creativity"

• PhD position 1 (65%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a master in linguistics or a related field, an interest in (German) morphosyntax, and some experience with experimental linguistics or corpus linguistics, demonstrated for instance by an empirical master thesis or prior work as research assistant.
• PhD position 2 (65%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a master in linguistics or a related field and an interest in (German) morphosyntax. Ideally, they have some experience with experimental linguistics or corpus linguistics, demonstrated for instance by an empirical master thesis or prior work as research assistant.

Details project A04 including open positions (.pdf)

 

Project A05 (Herrmann, Zarrieß) "Contextualised metrics of linguistic creativity in literary and non-literary text"

• PhD position 1 (65%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a master in German philology, literary studies, digital humanities or a related field, with some experience in either stylistics, rhetoric, and structuralist approaches to reading or in computational text analysis, stylometry and corpus-based literary studies. A (near) native speaker command of German is a pre-requisite as well as a strong interest in formal and computational approaches to literary language and discourse.
• PhD position 2 (100%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a master in Computational Linguistics or a related field, some practical experience in working with language models and machine learning in NLP and a strong interest in linguistically motivated approaches to computational language modeling.

Details project A05 including open positions (.pdf)

---

 

Project B01 (Bott, Michaelis, Solstad) "Coercion as a creative mechanism in compositional interpretation"

• PhD position 1 (65%) Profile: The successful candidate should have a Master’s degree either in psycholinguistics, theoretical or computational linguistics, and a good background in one of the other areas, respectively. Since the experiments will be conducted in German and involve subtle lexical semantic properties, a very good command of German is highly desirable. Experience with statistical methods (frequentist or Bayesian mixed effects regression modeling) and programming skills are desirable.
• PhD position 2 (65%) Profile: The successful candidate should have a Master’s degree in psycholinguistics, and a good background in theoretical linguistics. Experience with eyetracking and/or ERP research and statistical methods (frequentist or Bayesian mixed effects regression modeling) is a prerequisite. A good command of German is desirable.

Details project B01 including open positions (.pdf)

 

Project B02 (Buschmeier, Zarrieß) "Computational linguistic creativity in reference games between interactive dialogue agents"

• PhD position 1 (100%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a master’s degree in computational linguistics, cognitive science, linguistics, computer science or a related field and a strong interest in (1) analyzing dialogue data and (2) computationally modeling the dialogue and interactional components of the dialogue agent.

Details project B02 including open positions (.pdf)

 

Project B03 (Ackermann, Hartmann, Riester) "Indirectness in discourse: interrogatives, implicit meaning and incongruence"

• PhD position 1 (65%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a background in linguistics (syntax, pragmatics, and/or interface) and additionally has experience in experimental linguistics or corpus work. (Linguistic) Knowledge of a non-European language is a plus.
• PhD position 2 (65%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a background in discourse pragmatics (e.g. discourse structure, speech acts) and an interest in corpus annotation.

Details project B03 including open positions (.pdf)

 

Project B04 (Job, Knerich, Vogel) "Grammatical and conversation analysis of creative variations of multi-word expressions"

• PhD position 1 (65%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a master in linguistics or a related field. He/she has completed an excellent master's thesis in the field of linguistic conversation analysis, interactional linguistics or Gesprächsanalyse. He/she has experience in recording, transcribing (according to the conventions of GAT 2) and especially in analysing natural conversations. He/she has a solid education in all relevant fields of linguistics and an interest in collaborating within and beyond the field.

• PhD position 2 (65%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a master in linguistics or a related field. He/she has completed an excellent master's thesis in the field of semantics, pragmatics and/or morpho-syntax of German. He/she has experience in the formal analysis of the structure and meaning of complex linguistic expressions. He/she has a solid education in all relevant fields of linguistics and an interest in collaborating within and beyond the field.

Details project B04 including open positions (.pdf)

 

Project B05 (Zakkou, Nimtz) "Open texture as a source of semantic creativity"

• PhD position 1 (65%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a completed academic university degree at Master’s level (Master, M.A. or comparable) in a subject relevant to the project. The candidate has a suitable background in the philosophy of language or in linguistics, and a keen interest to join a research team on open texture.

Details project B05 including open positions (.pdf)

---

 

Project C01 (Cholin, Häussler) "Producing and understanding creative word formations"

• PhD position 1 (65%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a master in linguistics or a related field, ideally with experience with experimental psycholinguistics and an interest in language production and/or word formation.
• PhD position 2 (65%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a master in linguistics or a related field, ideally with experience with experimental psycholinguistics and an interest in language comprehension and/or word formation.

Details project C01 including open positions (.pdf)

 

Project C02 (Cholin, Kopp) "Multimodal creativity in speech-gesture production"

• PhD position (100%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a master in computational linguistics, computer science or a related field, ideally with experience in machine learning techniques.
• PostDoc position (100%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a PhD in linguistics or a related with a focus on experimental psycholinguistics and experience in computational modeling.
  Official announcement (German / English)

Details project C02 including open positions (.pdf)

 

Project C03 (de Beer, Hielscher-Fastabend, Richter) "Creativity in verbal and multimodal communication of people with neurogenic language and communication disorders"

• PhD position 1 (65%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a master in Clinical Linguistics or a related field and a research interest as well as some clinical experience in assessment within the field of neurogenic language and communication disorders. Basic methodological knowledge in experimental research and statistical data analysis is beneficial.
• PhD position 2 (65%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a master in Clinical Linguistics or a related field and a research interest as well as some clinical experience in assessment within the field of neurogenic language and communication disorders. Basic methodological knowledge in experimental research and statistical data analysis is beneficial. An interest in multimodal communication is required, but experience in this area of research is not necessary.

Details project C03 including open positions (.pdf)

 

Project C04 (Hielscher-Fastabend, Rohlfing, Settinieri) "On the role of linguistic creativity in the language use of mono- and multilingual children with vs without developmental language disorders"

• PhD position 1 (65%, Paderborn University) Profile: The ideal candidate has a master in psycholinguistics or a closely related field with a special emphasis on gestures and multimodal analysis of communication as well as some experience in working with preschool children.
• PhD position 2 (65%, Bielefeld University) Profile: The ideal candidate has a master in German as a foreign/second language or a closely related field, including some training in qualitative as well as quantitative empirical methods and a focus on analysing learner language.

Details project C04 including open positions (.pdf)

 

Project C05 (Kissler, Wegrzyn) "Verbal fluency as a window into the mechanisms of creative language production"

• PhD position 1 (75%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a master in psychology or a related field, with a focus on experimental methods and affective and social neuroscience, including fMRI. Ideally, the person is familiar with computational modeling using R or Python.
• PhD position 2 (75%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a master in psychology or a related field, prior experience in programming (e.g. Python), computational modeling and fMRI data acquisition and analysis (e.g. Representational Similarity Analysis).

Details project C05 including open positions (.pdf)

---

Project INF (Buschmeier, Jorschick, Schrader) "User-oriented research infrastructure assisting linguistic data collection and (re-)use"

• Post-doc position 1 (100%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a PhD in psycholinguistics, linguistics, psychology or a related field, with broad working knowledge of empirical methods and applied statistics, as well as data management.
  Ofiicial announcement (German / English )
• PhD position 2 (100%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a Master's degree in computer science, computational linguistics, business informatics, data science or a related field. A research interest in open science, data management practices and knowledge of databases, ontologies, domain-specific languages and platform development is an advantage.
• PhD position 3 (65%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a university degree in German law (1. Staatsexamen with 7.5 points), a discernible interest in problems of data protection in the context of scientific research, and is ready to collaborate in an interdisciplinary team.
  Stellenausschreibung

Details project INF including open positions (.pdf)

 

Project Ö (Bott, Job, Pansegrau) "Public relations project"

• PostDoc position 1 (100%) Profile: The successful candidate should hold a PhD in science communication, science studies or related fields. A PhD that was completed in another discipline but has a clear focus on science communication is also possible. He/she has experience in the conception, coordination and scientific evaluation of projects developed in and for science communication, citizen science projects (preferably within the humanities), implementation of projects for and in the public sphere, professional experience in communications, ideally in university communications; relevant professional cross-media expertise. Experience with website relaunches is an advantage; strong conceptual and strategic skills; A research focus on linguistics would be welcome.
  Official announcement (German / English)
• PhD position 2 (100%) Profile: The successful candidate should have a Master’s degree in computer science or computational linguistics, and a good background in web-based psycholinguistic research. Good programming skills (Python, Javascript, and possibly other programming languages) but also experience with administration of webservers for online experimentation are a prerequisite.  Experience with jsPsych, Pushkin and Drupal are an asset. Furthermore, a background in statistics as well as semantics and pragmatics is expected.  A good command of German is a prerequisite. The successful candidate is expected to have good communication skills for instructing other CRC members on the developed system in regular meetings.
• PhD position 3 (65%) Profile: The successful candidate should have a relevant Master’s degree (e.g. linguistics with a focus on analysing natural conversations; interaction linguistics; sociolinguistics; communication and media studies); a research focus in scientific communication, excellent German language skills, good command of English, familiarity with recording techniques, transcription systems (preferably GAT2) and processing tools (preferably EXMARAalDA) for natural conversations, solid knowledge of qualitative methods, excellent communication skills.

Details project Ö including open positions (.pdf)

 

Projects RTG (Settinieri) "Integrated research training group" and Z (Vogel) "Central administrative project"

• Postdoc (50% RTG & 50% Z)
  Tasks (RTG): Organisation, coordination and evaluation of the activities of the SFB Graduate School: lectures, workshops, summer schools, scholarships
  Tasks (Z): Administrative and coordinating support of the CRC management committee, e. g. organising events; responsibility for CRC-internal communication; assisting the spokespersons in meetings of the management committee and their preparation; overseeing finances
  What we expect: doctoral degree (by employment date) in linguistics or a related field; excellent written and spoken English; cooperative and team-oriented working style; good communication and coordination skills; the ability to take initiative and work independently; strong organizational and coordination skills; good presentation skills
  Preferred experience and skills: experience in various linguistic research methods, research management, the organisation of workshops and conferences, science communication, mentoring; interest in working in a larger interdisciplinary research initiative; basic knowledge of German or willingness to learn German
  Official announcement (German / English)

• TV-L E9a administrative position (details will follow)