This is a job advertisement for a two-year RA position, on the diachrony of Case in Greek (project details and job specification below)

Deadline: 24th April 2017

Apply here: https://atsv7.wcn.co.uk/search_engine/jobs.cgi?SID=amNvZGU9MTYzOTA3OSZ2dF90ZW1wbGF0ZT0xMTI2Jm93bmVyPTUwNDM3ODEmb3duZXJ0eXBlPWZhaXImYnJhbmRfaWQ9MCZsb2NhdGlvbl9jb2RlPTE2MzEwJnBvc3RpbmdfY29kZT0zNDc=

For informal queries please email Christina Sevdali: [log in to unmask] 

Project background

The research associate will be employed as part of AHRC-funded project “Investigating Variation and Change: Case in diachrony”.

The team involves Christina Sevdali (PI) and Elena Anagnostopoulou (CoI) and a further research assistant (corpus linguist) that will be employed in the second year of the project. The research assistant will be employed for two years and will be based at Ulster University, Northern Ireland. 

This research project focuses on the study of the category of case as the morphological expression of grammatical functions and its link to formal syntax. The overall aim of this project is to identify the universal and the language-specific aspects of case, by looking deeply into the properties of the case system of one language, Greek, in the course of its diachronic development in the last two thousand and eight hundred years, including the different diachronic paths taken by the Northern Greek dialects and Standard Modern Greek. 
The theoretical objectives of our project are, (a) To decipher what aspects of case are universal and what are language particular;
(b) To explore the role of case morphology in a linguistic system vis à vis the syntactic behaviour of nominals; (c) To investigate the consequences for the syntax of case when the morphology of a linguistic system changes. 
However, the project also has important objectives regarding maximizing the impact of theoretical linguistic research. To this end, the objectives of the project are,
(a) To identify important data on the nature and diachrony of case in Greek;
(b) To inform the public on the value of nurturing dialects; (c) To inform the education sector in the ways that linguistic research on case can be used in the teaching of these concepts. 
To achieve these objectives, this project will undertake the following tasks:
(a) Focus on the diachrony of morphological dative and genitive case in Greek, as these cases are the ones that changed the most.
(b) Collect, analyze and digitize data from a variety of syntactic environments, such as datives and genitives as objects of monotransitives and ditransitives, and quirky subjects and how they interact with nominatives.
(c) Make data available to other researchers in a variety of fields (theoretical and historical linguistics, dialectology, lexicography, grammar-writing) in the form of a digitized corpus. The corpus will be morphologically and syntactically annotated and it will also be searchable; (d) Undertake fieldwork to collect data from Northern Greek dialects that exhibit a distinct behavior from Standard Greek in terms of aspects of their case systems;
(e) Create a variety of videos that will introduce the topic of the research to the general public, present the benefits of speaking more than one dialect, on a par with speaking more than one language. Make these videos available to the wider public through the project website;
(f) Create two teaching plans for teaching the concept of case to speakers whose first language does have case morphology and to speakers whose first language does not. Make these teaching plans available to the wider public through the project website. 
The main deliverables of the project include:
i.	Two conference presentations, one theoretical and one diachronic.

ii.	Two journal articles, one historical and one theoretical. 
iii.	A Workshop to be hosted in Greece in the diachrony of case systems. 

iv.	An edited book to follow. The team will edit, write the 
introduction and contribute one chapter in the volume. 

v.	The data collected from this project will become available to the (academic) public in the form of 
an online treebank searchable and annotated. 

A project website that will also include non-academic material, such as: (a) Short videos on the topic of the project for dissemination of the main findings to the general public and non-academic beneficiaries; (b) Information (including videos) about the benefits of bi-dilectalism and the threat of language death; (c) Short videos about the history of the Greek language; (d) Short videos about the relevance of theoretical linguistic research in language teaching. (e) Two teaching plans for teaching the category of case to different types of second language learners. 

Job Purpose

To support the research project team involved in the “Investigating Variation and Change: Case in diachrony” supported by the AHRC (AH/P006612/1) by assisting with the corpus and theoretical work proposed in the project. 

The research associate will collect the data needed for the project (corpus and judgement data) and will assist in the dissemination of the undertaken work. 

The research associate will have to liaise with non-academic beneficiaries to drive the impact agenda for the project as well as lead the organisation of the workshop and the book proposal with Oxford University Press. 

	
Main Duties

1.	Collect data from online and offline Greek corpora (eg. Thesaurus Linguae Grecae (TLG)/Perseus Digital Library/Papyri.info etc.); 

2.	Classify data;

3.	Initially annotate data (morphology/syntax); 

4.	Help analyse the data, develop the theoretical proposal and lead the writing of the associated academic papers;

5.	Collect data from Northern Greek dialect speakers; 

6.	Liaise with non-academic beneficiaries to drive the impact agenda for the project;

7.	Lead the organisation of the Workshop and the book proposal with Oxford University Press;

8.	Be the point of contact among the members of the team; 

9.	Any other duties appropriate to the grade and nature of the post.