[Histling-l] Postdoc Romance Linguistics, Sorbonne University Paris

[Anna Carlier]

FULL-TIME POST-DOCTORAL RESEARCHER
Field of specialization: Linguistics and Philology

CLOSING DATE : September 25, 2019
DURATION OF THE CONTRACT : 11 months
SALARY INDICATION : 2 410 € gross monthly salary

SORBONNE UNIVERSITY

Sorbonne University was created on January 1, 2018, and is the result 
of the merger between Paris-Sorbonne University and Pierre and Marie 
Curie University. Sorbonne University is a multidisciplinary, 
world-class university, with a long tradition of academic excellence.  
Anchored in the heart of Paris, with a regional presence, it is s 
devoted to the success of its students and is committed to meeting the 
scientific challenges of the 21st century. 
(http://www.sorbonne-universite.fr/en)

PROJECT CoRaLHis
Comparing Romance Languages through History (CoRaLHis):
building a multilingual parallel diachronic corpus (13th-18th C.)

This project aims to provide a thorough understanding of how languages 
diverge from each other over time in the field of Romance languages.  It 
is part of a long tradition of research on Romance studies initiated in 
the 19th century by the comparatist works of Diez or Meyer-Lübke, but 
takes advantage of new theoretical paradigms such as the theory of 
grammaticalization (see for example Hopper/Traugott 1983, Lehmann 1985, 
Narrog & Heine 2011) and the grammar of diachronic constructions 
(Traugott & Trousdale 2013).

Based on the assumption that the different Romance languages evolve and 
innovate their grammar at a different rate and thus form a continuum of 
innovation compared to their common ancestor, Latin (cf. thematic issue 
of Folia Linguistica “On the Pace of Grammaticalization in Romance”), 
the aim is to build a multilingual digital corpus of comparable texts 
from the 13th to 18th centuries for Romania’s three main area’s (Gallo-, 
Italo- and Ibero-Romance), in order to allow a large-scale and 
fine-grained empirically analysis of linguistic change in the different 
Romance languages.

LABORATORY
The researcher will be a member of the EA 4509 «Meaning, Text, Computer 
Science, History», which develops research in the fields of language and 
text history, language sciences, and computational linguistics.

MISSION STATEMENT
The researcher will be active in the research project “Comparing 
Romance Languages through History (CoRaLHis): building a multilingual 
parallel diachronic corpus (13th-18th C.)”

MAIN ACTIVITIES
- Prospecting to gather appropriate textual resources for major Romance 
areas (Gallo-, Italo-, Ibero-Romance)
- Definition of metadata common to the different languages (external 
variation criteria), definition of bibliographic records and their 
management, definition of common philological criteria
- Definition of criteria for the selection of texts common to the 
different languages
- Description by means of metadata and selection of texts from the 
corpus
- Definition of the criteria for organizing the corpus in order to 
partition the corpus into sub-corpora
- Definition of internal variation parameters for the different Romance 
varieties
- Resolution of legal issues, in particular for published texts, so 
that the corpus can be in open access in the long term
- Supervision of the standardization operations of the selected text 
resources

REQUIREMENTS
- PhD in Linguistics or Philology
- Interest in history and digital philology
- Expertise in philology, and knowledge of medieval and preclassical 
French, or a command of a Romance language other than French, and 
acquaintance with its premodern stages.
- Knowledge of standard computer software (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, 
and, optionally, Access)
- Willingness to learn standard corpus formats (Unicode text, XML, TEI) 
and conversion tools, in order to be able to supervise standardization 
operations of text resources
- Excellent research skills
- Excellent communicative, social, and organizational skills

FURTHER INFORMATION
For further information, please contact:  
Anna.Carlier at sorbonne-universite.fr