진학프로석·박사 채용 접수 플랫폼

Are you fascinated by how we use language? Then join the new NWO research project ‘Commitments in Communication’ as a PhD candidate. You will aim to understand commitments in communication, combining linguistic experiments with theoretical communication analysis.

By speaking we undertake commitments, obligations to others to act in certain ways. We do this both by performing speech acts and by choosing certain vocabulary. Within linguistics, the notion of commitments has popped up in accounts of a wide range of phenomena (ranging from promises to rising declaratives, and from evidentiality markers to transparent free relatives). In our society, issues about commitment come up in the media and even in court rooms.

Despite the central place of commitment in both our language make-up and our society, a true understanding of how we undertake, attribute and avoid commitments through language use is lacking. This understanding is what this project aims to contribute to.

You will perform a series of experiments in which you measure the commitments that discourse participants undertake as interpreted by the participants in the experiment. This is measured using explicit and implicit judgments. For the latter, you will use, inter alia, physiological measures such as fEMG. Combined with theoretical discourse analysis (as used in the fields of semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, conversational analysis and dialogue modelling), the series of experiments will result in four journal papers, to be integrated into a dissertation.

You will participate in relevant conferences, workshops and seminars, and communicate your findings through publications in proceedings and peer-reviewed journals. In addition to your research, you will have a 12.5% teaching load. You will also have the opportunity to further develop your skill set by attending courses that are relevant for your project and general development.

Would you like to learn more about what it’s like to pursue a PhD at Radboud University? Visit the page about working as a PhD candidate.