PhD Studentship: Fully Funded PhD Studentship on Predictability in Romance Verbal Inflection
Overview
The Surrey Morphology Group at the University of Surrey invites applications for a fully funded PhD studentship on the comparative predictability of Romance verbal inflection. It forms part of a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship project called Scaling predictability in Morphological paradigms, which measures how much information speakers have when they infer the shape of an inflected word, much as an English speaker can guess that a new verb will form its past tense by adding the usual ending. The project asks how hard such predictions are across languages, which structures help, and whether languages become more predictable over time. It builds new computational tools to measure this and applies them to comparable datasets.
The PhD focuses on Romance languages, for which plentiful data exists and whose history is well documented, allowing a deep study of predictability both at one point in time and across historical change. The student collaborates with project members working on other language families and benefits from the group's standing as a leading centre for morphological theory, typology and description.
Who can apply
The studentship is open to UK and international candidates who meet the minimum entry requirements for the Linguistics PhD programme. Selection looks for excellent undergraduate performance, expertise in morphological description and analysis, familiarity with Romance linguistics, the ability to meet the English language requirements and willingness to learn the computational methods, with no prior expertise needed.
What you get
The studentship provides 3.5 years (42 months) of funding. Fees are covered at the UK or international rate, together with the UKRI standard stipend of 21,805 GBP for the 2026-27 academic year and support for conference travel.
How to apply
Applications are submitted through the Linguistics PhD programme page. Applicants should also send a CV and a one-page statement of interest to the named administrator, giving the project title and supervisors' names.
Key dates
The closing date is 20 December 2026. The studentship starts in April 2027, and later start dates may be possible.
Links in this posting
- Supervisors: Dr Sacha Beniamine, Dr Oliver Bond and Dr Matteo Pellegrini
- Supervisors: Dr Sacha Beniamine, Dr Oliver Bond and Dr Matteo Pellegrini
- Supervisors: Dr Sacha Beniamine, Dr Oliver Bond and Dr Matteo Pellegrini
- 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.
- In addition, please send a CV along with a one-page statement of interest to Alison Stubley (a.stubley@surrey.ac.uk), specifying the title of the project and name of the supervisors.