PhD Student position in Scandinavian Linguistics within the School of Humanities

The University of Iceland welcomes applications for a PhD position within the School of Humanities. The doctoral project is research of adverbial clauses in Icelandic and related languages. The project is funded for two years by the University of Iceland Research Fund. Work on the doctoral program should preferably commence in September 2022.

We are looking for an individual who has enthusiasm for the subject matter and a determination to finish a doctorate program at the University of Iceland.

The proposed project aims to investigate the nature of syntactic subordination in general and the properties of adverbial clauses (ACs) in particular, using the Scandinavian languages as a test case with a special emphasis on Icelandic and Faroese. The main empirical goal of the project is to provide a systematic and detailed comparison of the applicability of Main Clause Phenomena (MCP) in central, peripheral and non-integrated ACs, both by collecting questionnaire data and using existing tagged corpora. The concrete theoretical goal is to compare the most recent approaches to the syntax of ACs to account for the distribution of MCP. The central research question is to what extent adverbial clauses are reminiscent to argument clauses on the one hand and relative clauses on the other hand. The research project would be the first systematic overview of the syntax of adverbial clauses in Scandinavian from a comparative perspective. In fact, adverbial clauses have been an understudied subclass of subordinate clauses, perhaps due to their complex and apparently controversial word order conditions. This Ph.D. position would contribute not only to the ongoing theoretical discussions, but also to cross-linguistic generalizations. Keeping in mind that there may be individual speaker differences due to resistance to embedded fronting in general, and, in addition to this, there may be age differences, it is of particular descriptive and empirical importance to collect judgements data from all the Scandinavian languages.

The PhD student should be enrolled in a full-time program at the University of Iceland during the grant period. The supervisor is Dr. Ásgrímur Angantýsson, professor of Icelandic linguistics.