PhD Studentship: Fully funded PhD Studentship on predictability in Romance verbal inflection

University of Surrey; Guildford; On-site; GBP 21,000 - 23,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Full funding

UKRI stipend

Conference travel support

Job summary

The Surrey Morphology Group at the University of Surrey invites applications for a PhD studentship funded for 3.5 years (42 months). The project investigates the comparative predictability of Romance verbal inflection within the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship Scaling predictability in Morphological paradigms.

The successful candidate will develop computational tools to measure the information available to speakers when predicting inflected forms.

Qualifications

• Excellent undergraduate performance
• Expertise in morphological description and analysis
• Familiarity with Romance linguistics
• Ability to meet English language entry requirements for PhD
• Willingness to learn computational methodology

Responsibilities

• Conduct research on Romance verbal inflection predictability.
• Develop computational tools to measure information available to speakers.
• Collaborate with project members and supervisors to advance methodology and data

Skills

Morphology expertise

Linguistic analysis

Romance linguistics

Job description

The Surrey Morphology Group at the University of Surrey is inviting applications for a PhD studentship that offers 3.5 years (42 months) of funding and extensive associated resources. The topic is the comparative predictability of Romance verbal inflection, and forms part of the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship project `Scaling predictability in Morphological paradigms`. The project seeks to measure the amount of information available to speakers when they make inferences about the shape of inflected words. For example, English speakers can guess that the past tense of a new verb like "glorp" might be "glorped", following the same pattern as "jump" / "jumped". This raises fundamental questions about how languages work: How hard it is to make these predictions across languages? What language structures help, and how do they vary? Do languages become more predictable over time? To answer these questions, the project will innovate new computational tools able to measure the information available to speakers when they predict forms and apply them to comparable datasets.

The PhD position is focused on Romance languages, for which ample data already exists, and the diachrony of which is well known. This will allow for a deep dive into the synchronic and diachonic properties of predictability. The PhD candidate will have the opportunity to collaborate with members of the project involved in developing the methodology and data and answering the questions in other families.

The position is based at the University of Surrey, within the Surrey Morphology Group (SMG). In addition to the collaborative activities within the project, the successful candidate will benefit from the research environment of the SMG, a world leading centre for research on morphological theory, typology and description.

Supervisors

Dr Sacha Beniamine, Dr Oliver Bond and Dr Matteo Pellegrini

Entry requirements

Open to any UK or international candidates. Starting in April 2027. Later start dates may be possible, please contact Dr Sacha Beniamine once the deadline passes.

You will need to meet the minimum entry requirements for our PhD programme.

The successful candidates will be selected on the basis of the following criteria

• Excellent overall performance at undergraduate level;
• Expertise in morphological description and analysis;
• Familiarity with Romance linguistics;
• Ability to meet the English language entry requirements for the PhD Linguistics;
• Willingness to learn the technical aspects of the computational methodology (but no prior expertise needed).

Funding

UK or international fees covered, plus UKRI standard stipend (£21,805 for 2026-27 academic year) and support for conference travel.

Application deadline

20 December 2026

Enquiries

Contact Dr Sacha Beniamine

Ref

PGR-2627-003

UK or international fees covered, plus UKRI standard stipend (£21,805 for 2026-27 academic year) and support for conference travel