Project A01 “Intonation and attention orienting: Neurophysiological and behavioral correlates” of the Collaborative Research Centre 1252 “Prominence in Language“ seeks to fill a doctoral position (part, time, 65%, 25.89 hours/week) from April 01, 2025 until December 31, 2028. If the necessary prerequisites required by tariff regulations as well as the required personal qualifications are met, the salary will correspond to the pay grade 13 as specified in the States’ Tariff Agreement (TVL).

Project A01 “Intonation and attention orienting: Neurophysiological and behavioral correlates” aims to refine our model of prosodic prominence by providing more elaborate and complete characterisations of signal prominence (highlighting a universal bottom-up approach) and code prominence (highlighting a language-specific top-down approach). Our goal is (i) to determine the most adequate acoustic measures of prosodic prominence, (ii) to identify the timing patterns of co-speech beat gestures that contribute to prominence and (iii) to investigate the prominence-cueing potential of the association of H tones to different positions in prosodic structure (heads and edges). A particular focus of the advertised position will be the examination of the association between speech and beat gestures and their contribution to prominence marking. This will involve annotations of video corpora of natural speech and co-speech gestures as well as behavioral and electrophysiological studies to investigate the comprehension of multimodal prominence-related cues and their alignment.

Your tasks

• Carry out phonetic and phonological analysis of intonation and beat gestures, including visualization of prosodic and gestural parameters
• Prepare speech and video stimuli for experiments
• Design, conduct and analyze rating tasks on the alignment of speech and gesture
• Design, run and analyze ERP experiments
• Present your results at international conferences and in academic journals

Your profile

• You are familiar with research on prosody and/or electrophysiology
• You have experience with R or other programming languages
• You are highly proficient in German and English
• You are capable of working in a team and working at the interface to related projects
• You are capable of quickly adapting to new research topics 

More information here.

Project A07 “Metrical prominence - Scales and structures“ of the Collaborative Research Centre 1252 “Prominence in Language“ seeks to fill a doctoral position (part time, 65%, 25.89 hours/week) from April 01, 2025 until December 31, 2028. If the necessary prerequisites required by tariff regulations as well as the required personal qualifications are met, the salary will correspond to the pay grade 13 as specified in the States’ Tariff Agreement (TVL).

The general aim of project A07 is to explore the relationship between semantic-pragmatic, syntactic and prosodic properties of words using metrical strength relations. In phase III the project will broaden its perspective by adding the visual modality to the spoken modality investigated so far. Our central research topic will thus be the division of labour between speech and gesture in the expression as well as perception of multimodal prominence. We will gain insights on whether the contribution of pitch accents and beat components of hand, head and eyebrow gestures as a function of meaning-related factors is additive or compensatory in nature. The same set of factors will be examined in (a) a TED Talk, (b) a comparison between monologic and dialogic communication and (c) native (German) speech versus speech by language learners (French learners of German). To supplement the production side of our investigations, a series of rating experiments will be conducted to test the role and impact of beat-like gestures as well as pitch accents in processing and judging the strength of multimodal prosodic prominences.

Your tasks

• Carry out phonetic and phonological analyses of intonation and beat gestures, as well as semantic-pragmatic and syntactic annotations
• Visualize and statistically evaluate the data
• Prepare speech and video stimuli for experiments
• Design, conduct and analyze rating tasks on the prominence of speech and gesture
• Present your results at international conferences and in academic journals

Your profile

• You are familiar with research on prosody and/or speech-accompanying gestures
• You have experience with Praat and ELAN, including writing scripts
• You have experience with R or other programming languages
• You are highly proficient in German and English
• You are capable of working in a team and working at the interface to related projects
• You are capable of quickly adapting to new research topics 

More information here.

Project B02 “Beyond split case marking: Participant coding strategies in East African languages” of the Collaborative Research Centre 1252 “Prominence in Language“ seeks to fill a doctoral position (part time, 65%, 25.89 hours/week) from April 01, 2025 until December 31, 2028. If the necessary prerequisites required by tariff regulations as well as the required personal qualifications are met, the salary will correspond to the pay grade 13 as specified in the States’ Tariff Agreement (TVL).

Project B02 “Beyond split case marking: Participant coding strategies in East African languages” investigates participant coding strategies in two East African languages with split case marking: Tima (Niger-Congo, Sudan) and Datooga (Nilotic, Tanzania). The goal is to understand how interlocutors deploy certain morphosyntactic constructions for prominence management in discourse. The PhD project will focus on impersonal and antipassive constructions in the Datoogalanguage, structures that pragmatically implicate a clausal participant which is not realized morphosyntactically. The investigation will bebased on an existing corpus of conversation and narrative, with the option of conducting linguistic fieldwork to enrich the study.

Your tasks

• Investigate the form and function of the impersonal and antipassive constructions in Datooga
• Investigate how interlocutors choose between different constructions to manage prominence relations in discourse
• Design and conduct original fieldwork in Tanzania to further our understanding of the use of these constructions (optional but recommended)
• Present your results at international conferences and in academic journals
• Provide scientific and administrative support to the project team

Your profile

• You are familiar with descriptive and typological linguistics
• You have experience working with linguistic corpora
• You are interested in the discourse functions of grammatical resources
• You are highly proficient in German and English
• You are capable of working in a team as well as independently 

More information here.

Project B04 “Interaction of nominal and verbal features for Differential Object Marking” of the Collaborative Research Centre 1252 “Prominence in Language” seeks to fill a doctoral position (part time, 65%, 25.89 hours/week) from April 01, 2025 until December 31, 2028. If the necessary prerequisites required by tariff regulations as well as the required personal qualifications are met, the salary will correspond to the pay grade 13 as specified in the States’ Tariff Agreement (TVL).

Project B04 “Interaction of nominal and verbal features for Differential Object Marking” views Differential Object Marking (DOM) as the result of a complex interaction between nominal features, verbal features, and discourse structure. Following on from the results of phase II, we will investigate (1) specific (sub)classes of the referentiality hierarchy such as definite NPs involving functional and sortal nouns in Old Spanish as well as bare nouns in modern Spanish; (2) the interaction of DOM and clitic doubling of the direct object ‒that is, Differential Object Indexing (DOI)‒ in Argentinian and Peruvian Spanish as well as Istanbul Judeo-Spanish; and (3) the dependency of null objects from prominence management in discourse in Argentinian and Basque Spanish.

Your tasks

• You will collect and statistically analyze data on Differential Object Marking in Spanish from different corpora.
• You will prepare, conduct, and statistically analyze elicitation experiments on Differential Object Marking in Spanish.
• You will present your results at international conferences and make them available to the research community. 

Your profile

• You are capable of working in a team and working at the interface to related projects.
• You are capable of quickly adapting to new research topics.
• Prerequisites are excellent Spanish and fluent English. Good German language skills are an advantage.
• You should have an efficient and above-averagely well-organized and results-oriented working style.

More information here.

Project B06 “Attention and prominence in language production and acquisition” of the Collaborative Research Centre 1252 “Prominence in Language“ seeks to fill two doctoral positions (each part time, 65%, 25.89 hours/week) from April 01, 2025 until December 31, 2028. If the necessary prerequisites required by tariff regulations as well as the required personal qualifications are met, the salary will correspond to the pay grade 13 as specified in the States’ Tariff Agreement (TVL).

Project B06 “Attention and prominence in language production and acquisition” examines the link between attention and linguistic prominence with a particular focus on language production. The project investigates how perceptual and conceptual features draw attention and affect speakers’ descriptions of depicted event scenes. During the next phase, the aim of the project is to deepen and complete our insights into the attention-language interface by focusing on two strands of research: (i) the project will target the development of the attention-language interface in typically-developing children and (ii) will address how the connection between attention and prominence in language is conditioned by impairments of attention or language abilities. With respect to this latter goal, the project will focus on individuals with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD). Each PhD candidate will work on one of these questions. Please note that the data collection on adults with ADHD will take place in Bonn.

Your tasks

• carry out research with either (i) typically-developing children or (ii) with adult individuals with ADHD
• design experiments and prepare stimuli for experiments
• program experiments in Experiment Builder
• contact participants
• run and analyze eye-tracking experiments
• present your results at international conferences and in academic journals

Your profile

• You have experience with empirical research especially with eye-tracking studies
• You have experience with statistical analysis, preferably with R
• You have experience with programming psycholinguistic experiments with relevant software, preferably with Experiment Builder
• You are highly proficient in German and English
• You are capable of working in a team and working at the interface to related projects
• You are capable of quickly adapting to new research topics 

More information here.

Project B08 “Non-canonical aligment in Nuristani” of the Collaborative Research Centre 1252 “Prominence in Language“ seeks to fill a doctoral position (part time, 65%, 25.89 hours/week) from April 01, 2025 until December 31, 2028. If the necessary prerequisites required by tariff regulations as well as the required personal qualifications are met, the salary will correspond to the pay grade 13 as specified in the States’ Tariff Agreement (TVL).

Project B08 “Non-canonical aligment in Nuristani” aims to refine our understanding of morphosyntactic prominence, its evolvement and subsequent development by investigating the phenomenon of Differential Object Marking in three languages belonging to the Nuristani sub-branch of Indo-Iranian. The objectives of the projects are (i) a comprehensive synchronic description of the alignment systems in the relevant Nuristani languages by means of a corpus-based detailed investigation, (ii) establishing the diachronic sources for different types of Nuristani predicates, (iii) a comprehensive reconstruction of the emergence of Differential Object Marking and its subsequent evolution in Nuristani. A particular focus of the advertised position will be, first, on thecorpus-based investigation of the relevant languages and, second, on the application of the classical Comparative Method to a group of closely related but underinvestigated languages.

Your tasks

• Acquiring a working knowledge of the relevant Nuristani languges
• Annotating a selection of representative texts
• Establishing correlations between alignment type and other characteristics of the relevant clauses
• Investigating the different types of predicates by means of Comparative Method
• Presenting the results at international conferences and in academic journals

Your profile

• You are familiar with pre-modern Indo-Iranian languages (at least with Sanskrit)
• You have experience with Comparative Method and its application in linguistic reconstruction
• You have strong writing skills in English and at least some working knowledge of German
• You are capable of working in a team and working at the interface to related projects
• You are capable of quickly adapting to new research topics and new languages to work with

More information here.

Project B09 “Prominence in action: The competition for argument marking in German Sign Language (DGS)” of the Collaborative Research Centre 1252 “Prominence in Language“ seeks to fill a doctoral position (65%, 25.89 hours/week) from April 1, 2025 until December 31, 2028. If the necessary pre-requisites required by tariff regulations as well as the required personal qualifications are met, the salary will correspond to the pay grade 13 as specified in the States’ Tariff Agreement (TVL).

Project B09 “Prominence in action: The competition for argument marking in German Sign Language (DGS)” investigates argument marking from the perspective of referential prominence. We focus, in particular, on the use of signs (including PAM) exhibiting differential object marking; the role of constructed action (CA) as marking subject prominence;the spatial modification of verbs; and the nature of zero marking of arguments with respect to managing prominence relations in discourse. The project will be based primarily on annotation and analysis of data from the DGS (Public) Corpus, including some elicited data, and will focus on larger discourse segments and dyadic conversational data to achieve an understanding of the structural properties of DGS relevant to reference management and gain more detailed insight into prominence relations in discourse and interaction. Overall, the project aims to further our understanding of the inventory of morphosyntactic prominence cues and grammatical phenomena that involve prominence relations for DGS.

Your tasks

• Design of corpus-/discourse-based studies investigating prominence relations in DGS
• Coding and annotation of DGS data using the linguistic annotation software ELAN
• Analysis of DGS data using ELAN tools as well as the ANNIS corpus tool
• Collection of additional DGS data based on an elicitation task, if needed
• Presentation of results at international conferences and in academic journals

Your profile

• You have DGS skills to level B2 (CEFR) (minimum), or equivalent knowledge of another sign language and basic knowledge of DGS with the willingness to attain greater proficiency in DGS
• You have experience in coding and annotation of sign language data
• You have experience in quantitative and statistical analysis
• You are capable of working in a team, especially a deaf-hearing team
• You have good communication skills, especially written English

More information here.

Project B10 “The role of gender in prominence hierarchies: A cross-linguistic and cross-register perspective” of the Collaborative Research Centre 1252 “Prominence in Language” seeks to fill a doctoral position (part time, 65%, 25.89 hours/week) from April 01, 2025 until December 31, 2028. If the necessary prerequisites required by tariff regulations as well as the required personal qualifications are met, the salary will correspond to the pay grade 13 as specified in the States’ Tariff Agreement (TVL).

Project B10 seeks to investigate the role of gender in prominence hierarchies across different languages, modalities, and registers. Gender-motivated stereotypes and biases are known to be rooted in social gender hierarchies. We aim to investigate the extent to which both social and grammatical gender hierarchies are reflected in linguistic prominence hierarchies. To this end, we will conduct corpus and experimental studies to investigate the potential role of gender in a number of morphosyntactic alternations in (i) English (a language with no grammatical gender), (ii) French (a language with two grammatical genders that mostly match social/referential genders), and (iii) German (a language with more than two grammatical genders).

We are looking for a doctoral researcher interested in using quantitative corpus-linguistic methods and multivariable statistical techniques to account for the multi-dimensionality of prominence in naturally occurring data. For the data annotation, we aim to harness the potential of state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) methods. Our project aims to follow Open Science principles. As a result, the advertised position will also involve the annotation, curation, and archiving of the corpus data created as part of this project following FAIR principles, the pre-registration of corpus linguistics studies, and the elaboration of reproducible analysis pipelines. 

Your tasks

• Collect and pre-process corpus data in German and French
• Perform linguistic annotation on corpus data in German and French
• Design and conduct corpus studies on morpho-syntactic alternations in German and French
• Analyse the results using multivariable statistical methods
• Collaborate with the PLs on related studies
• Present your work at international conferences
• Publish your results in academic journals

Your profile

• You are familiar with corpus linguistics research
• You have experience with R (and/or other programming languages)
• You have experience with statistical modeling (preferably in R)
• You are highly proficient in English
• You are proficient in German and French
• You enjoy working in a team
• You can quickly adapt to new research topics
• You are interested in learning new research methods 

More information here.

Project C02 “Temporality and modalization in discourse structure” of the Collaborative Research Centre 1252 “Prominence in Language” seeks to fill two doctoral positions (each part time, 65%, 25.89 hours/week) from May 15/June 01, 2025 until December 31, 2028. If the necessary prerequisites required by tariff regulations as well as the required personal qualificationsare met, the salary will correspond to the pay grade 13 as specified in the States’ Tariff Agreement (TVL).

Project C02 “Temporality and modalization in discourse structure” investigates mood and modalization applying a prominence-based conception of discourse structure. Previously, the project focused on temporal discourse structure (phase I) and argumentative orientation (phase II). The aim of phase III is to gain a better understanding of TAM (tense-aspect-mood) categories and world reference. The phenomena investigated in detail are (1) propositional attitudes like individual beliefs or evaluations of events, (2) dream contexts and their distinction from the real world, and (3) free indirect discourse (FID) with its different “voices”. The project focuses on two Romance languages. One PhD candidate will work on Spanish, the other on Italian. Both PhD candidates will be encouraged to investigate subject (1), while subject (2) will be addressed with respect to Spanish and subject (3) with respect to Italian. 

Your tasks

• Research TAM use with respect to world reference and temporal reference considering the larger discourse context in a Romance language as part of a dissertation project
• Collect and analyze pertinent corpus data
• Design, conduct and statistically analyze experiments on the use of TAM forms in relation to verbal semantics
• Present your results at international conferences
• Support the organization of project conferences and meetings of the CRC

Your profile

• Your studies included a focus on Romance linguistics
• You are capable of thinking conceptually, of quickly fathoming out new research topics, and immerse into new research methods with pleasure
• You have excellent knowledge of one Romance language. Advanced knowledge of another Romance language is an advantage. Furthermore, you have command of both written and spoken English. Basic knowledge of German is an advantage, but may also be acquired during the first year of the PhD
• Teamworking skills are essential

More information here.

Project C11 “Prominence in Large Language Models” of the Collaborative Research Centre 1252 “Prominence in Language“ seeks to fill a doctoral position (part time, 65%, 25.89 hours/week) from April 01, 2025 until December 31, 2028. If the necessary prerequisites required by tariff regulations as well as the required personal qualifications are met, the salary will correspond to the pay grade 13 as specified in the States’ Tariff Agreement (TVL).

Project C11 investigates prominence with the help of large language models (LLMs)such as GPT or Llama. Language models are to take on the role of test subjects in psycholinguistic experiments, which means that the project also pursues a methodological goal. Initially, the aim is to replicate the results of linguistic experiments conducted with humans as well as possible - whereby the project also has to work out how exactly this can be measured and what “as well as possible” means. To this end, we are working together with three projects from the CRC, namely B04, C04 and C07. The experimental simulations will then be gradually expanded so that larger contexts with more decisions and variants can be investigated. Finally, the project will also investigate whether language models can not only simulate a -- relatively undefined -- entirety of speakers, but can also be used to simulate individual test subjects. 

Your tasks

• Establish a simulation environment for several models
• Develop the formal framework to compare human and LLM responses
• Establish parameters and experimental setup to replicate human experiments
• Conduct experiments using larger discourses, increased number of discourse referents etc.
• Present your results at international conferences and in academic journals

Your profile

• You are familiar with large language models and how to use them
• You have experience with the programming language python 
• You are highly proficient in German and English, Spanish is a plus
• You are capable of working in a team and working at the interface to related projects
• You are capable of quickly adapting to new research topics
• You have a university degree in (computational) linguistics, information processing, or similar

More information here.