Doctoral Position in Linguistics – Language Acquisition of Catalan

(part-time 65 %, E 13 TV-L)

Reference no.: 2026/071. The start date is 1st May 2026 or soon thereafter. The position is available until the end of 2029

The University of Konstanz is a dynamic and internationally successful research university with approximately 10,000 students. The campus university’s architecture promotes interdisciplinary cooperation and a sense of community among researchers, lecturers and students. The University of Konstanz has been continuously funded by the German Excellence Strategy since 2006.

The newly granted SFB 1760 investigates the role of silence and noise in our capacity for perceiving, learning and producing linguistic signals. The first phase will run from April 2026 to December 2029 and encompasses a wide variety of theoretical, experimental, computational and empirical research within linguistics, in collaboration with projects from computer science, computational social science, media studies and sociology.

This doctoral position is part of project ‘C03: Acquisition of Expletive Elements’. This project investigates the acquisition of expletive definite articles and expletive negation in pre-school and school-age Catalan, German and Greek monolingual children from a cross-linguistic perspective using corpus and experimental data. Corpus data from the CHILDES database will address the emergence of expletive definite articles and expletive negation. Experimental data will investigate the comprehension and production of expletive definite articles and expletive negation. This PhD position will focus mainly on Catalan and can also contribute to German.

Your Responsibilities

• Analysis of corpus data
• Design and implementation of comprehension and production experiments
• Working towards a PhD
• Contributing to the SFB by attending regular meetings and conducting research on SFB topics
• Presenting research at national and international conferences
• Contributing to transfer activities at the Centre for Multilingualism

Your Competencies

• MA/MSc degree in Language Acquisition/Multilingualism/Linguistics/Speech & Language Therapy, or related discipline (completed or in progress)
• Research interest in child language acquisition
• Some experience working with pre-school or school-age children
• Native or near native speaker of Catalan, very good proficiency in English, and ideally also German
• Excellent organizational and interpersonal skills
• Knowledge of statistics is desirable
• Experience in child corpora and language acquisition experiments is desirable

We Offer

• The opportunity to do a PhD within the SFB 1760 ‘Silence, Noise and Signal in Language’
• An open, motivated research team and interdisciplinary research environment
• Collaborating researchers at doctoral, postdoctoral and professorial levelsResearch support by student assistants
• Excellent career and equal opportunity coaching

Questions can be directed to Prof. Dr. Theodoros Marinis via e‑mail:

Online Application Portal

Applications should contain: i) a short motivation letter (max 2 pages), ii) an academic CV, iii) copies of all previous degrees, including detailed transcripts of records, iv) the names and email addresses of two academic referees (one from the supervisor of the BA/MA/MSc thesis or equivalent). Incomplete applications will not be considered.

We look forward to receiving your application by via our

The University of Konstanz is committed to ensuring an environment that provides equal opportunities and promotes diversity, as well as a good balance between university and family life. As an equal opportunity employer, we strive to increase the number of women working in research and teaching. We also support working couples through our dual career programme.

Persons with disabilities are explicitly encouraged to apply. They will be given preference if appropriately qualified (contact , + ).