30.06.2025

PhD Positions in Linguistics (m/f/d, E13 TV-L, 75%)

Faculty of Humanities, Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1718

Bewerbungsfrist: 15.07.2025

Two PhD positions are available in the DFB-funded Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1718 Common Ground: Cognition – Grammar – Communication.

PhD researchers in empirical syntax and/or pragmatics (m/f/d, E13 TV-L, 75%)

The positions are located at the University of Tübingen, Germany.  They begin on 1st October 2025 or as soon as possible afterwards, and run until 30th June 2029.

The posts are within the sub-project B6 Syntax Interacts with Common Ground: Non-Canonical Inversion Structures with project leaders Katrin Axel-Tober (German Dept.), Sam Featherston, Susanne Winkler (English Dept.). This project will investigate the conditions on and interpretative features of exceptional inversion structures in English such as ‘Into the room marched the bishop, a snarl on his face.’ 

Topics for doctorates could concern questions such:

• what contextual factors (text genre, information structure, and shared background knowledge) must come together to license such a structure?
• what is the syntactic structure of such examples?
• what does the inverted version contribute to the interpretation more than an uninverted version (‘The bishop marched into the room’)?  
• how do these structures relate to superficially similar-looking German examples?  

Theses will be jointly supervised by the project leaders and can be within the fields of German Linguistics or English Linguistics, but they are likely to have an empirical component.

The candidates should have finished their Masters degree in a related field of Linguistics by the start date of the project, and they should be enthusiastic about the work of the project. The project leaders will guide the research, and offer frequent support, advice, and consultation. The CRC offers an exceptionally rich research environment with excellent opportunities to work together with many other linguists on topics across the field. These posts therefore offer the ideal entry point to an academic career in linguistics.

Equally qualified applicants with disabilities will be given preference in the hiring process. The University of Tübingen is committed to equal opportunities and diversity. It therefore takes individual situations into account and asks for relevant information. The University of Tübingen seeks to raise the number of women in research and teaching and therefore urges suitable qualified women academics to apply for this position.  

Please send your application (consisting of CV and a short application letter summarizing your research experience and interests, plus the contact details of two potential referees) by July 15th, 2025 to Prof. Dr. Sam Featherston, sam.featherstonspam prevention@uni-tuebingen.de 

Further questions: the project leaders invite interested candidates to contact them informally for a chat prior to submitting an application. We would be very happy to answer any questions.  

The employment will be handled by the central administration of the University of Tübingen.

General information on hiring processes and the German academic system can be found here.