ACLC Newsletter July 2021
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Message from Academic Director ACLC
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Dear Colleagues,
In my last message to you, I thanked you for your commitment to the ACLC and to our community in such very difficult times when you had to work from home, while caring for your families and beloved ones. I had thought, I would not need to mention these “difficult times” again, almost a year later, but here we are, still hoping for the dust to settle soon. While writing this message to you, I heard the sad news of an old UvA colleague and friend being seriously ill. Each of us has had such moments this year, and some of us even battled against COVID-19. Yet, we prevailed, and when I look at all your achievements and all we have been able to accomplish this year, I feel extremely grateful and proud to have you as colleagues and collaborators of the ACLC.
Indeed, this year cannot be reduced to just “difficult times”. Starting with your contributions to knowledge, a quick look at your individual webpages shows that staff, Postdocs, and PhD candidates published some 180 articles/book chapters between 2020 and 2021. This is quite an astonishing output. This figure, however, will not be so impressive if we don’t consider the human factor, the only indicator of how resilient our community is.
Between September 2020 and July 2021, 9 ACLC PhD candidates graduated. Most of our graduates missed the festive side of a defence, while others had to cope with online or hybrid defence and its stressing unpredictable shortcomings. Despite these challenges, all graduates made it wonderfully, and I sincerely congratulate them and their supervisors. Likewise, 9 PhD candidates joined the ACLC last year, most of whom have already gone through their pilot phase successfully. Congratulations to them and their supervisors for this achievement. Our gratitude also goes to the ACLC moderators who mentor PhD candidates throughout their thesis project. Finally, several colleagues engaged in grant applications. Some learned from the experience, others have been awarded prestigious grants, while others are still running for upcoming submission deadlines. All of them deserve a special thanks, since this effort largely determines the state of research in our institute.
Following our strategic plan, we took several steps to strengthen our community by focusing on some key issues including reinventing our research groups to allow new research ideas and collaborative work to emerge. Likewise, the large scale hirings offered by our Faculty and the AHIR gave us the opportunity to collaborate with Department Chairs and Program Directors in order to secure six research positions within the ACLC. The envisaged profiles range from Sign Language Linguistics, (Second) Language Acquisition, Phonetics/Phonology to Computational Linguistics and Literary studies. These UDs will be affiliated to Linguistics, MVTC, and Neerlandistiek. The hiring procedures are still ongoing, but I can already inform you that the most promising candidates constitute a strong asset to the ACLC regarding both fundamental and experimental work. These new colleagues will represent a formidable opportunity for the ACLC to reach a new level in our inquiry on constraints on variation in human language, communication, and cognition. I’m looking forward to welcoming them next academic year.
We also engaged in strengthening our community by focusing on issues of diversity and social safety, and the local measures that need to be taken. This has led us to improve our procedures for the go-no-go interview and the progress interviews for PhD candidates and Postdocs significantly. In the context of the celebration of the 20 years of ACLC, the series of interviews organised by the program committee made it possible for us to get to know each other better and develop mutual interest in our research.
After all, this year was not just about “difficult times”. Instead, we had a year full of excitements and wonderful achievements, all made possible only thanks to your dedication and excellent team work. I’m grateful to you all and also to Brigit and Chantal for their tireless efforts to keep the ship afloat. I wish you all a very pleasant and restful summer break, and I’m looking forward to seeing you next academic year for further great achievements. Stay safe.
Thank you.
Enoch O. Aboh
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Hello! I am Heleen and I’ve recently started a PhD at the ACLC. My project is about numerical acquisition in Dutch- and Russian speaking children with and without Developmental Language Disorder and supervised by Judith Rispens, Alla Peeters-Podgaevskaja and Caitlin Meyer.
I am 27 years old and I live in Amsterdam, where I obtained my BA and MA: I studied Dutch language & culture (BA), Slavic languages & cultures (BA) and Linguistics (rMA) here at the UvA. These programmes sparked my interests in the relation between language and cognition and numeracy development in particular. Since my graduation, I have worked as a teacher of Dutch as a second language. While I enjoyed this work a lot, I started to miss research, and I am very happy to return to the ACLC with this exciting project!
In my free time, I love reading, baking, playing board games with friends, listening to music and playing the recorder. I am also the Twitter editor of the journal Russian Literature, which publishes articles on literary studies in Russian and English.
Liberty Notarte Balanquit
will join the ACLC in the autumn to work on her PhD project entitled ‘Constraints on Filipino Sign Language Variations: sociolinguistic and typological perspectives,’
under the supervision of Roland Pfau and Suzanne Aalberse.
Liberty earned her MA degree in Linguistics in 2017 from the University of the Philippines Diliman where she completed the Grammar Sketch of Ninorte Samarnon. She works at the University of the Philippines Los Baños. She earned her BA degree in Communication Arts from the same university system in 2011.
Liberty will analyze the sociolinguistic variations found not only on the lexical level in the domain of numerals but also on the syntactic level in the domain of negation using data from Filipino Sign Language (FSL), the nationally recognized visual-spatial language in the Philippines. Using a digital tool, she will analyze how far the diverse forms of FSL in the selected domains are statistically distributed between genders and across regions.
The new set of data from sign languages offer new evidence, e.g. iconicity and modality-effects on variability, for which the principles of quantitative modeling and of multiple causes of the Labovian sociolinguistic framework can further be tested in the visual language modality. By adding an as yet understudied sign language from Southeast Asia, the research will mitigate the problem of data scarcity and bias in the field of sign language typology. This project also allows for the development of a modality-specific sociolinguistic framework that can explain the extent of correlation between sign language variations and the macrolevel social variables that have long been identified for spoken languages since the 1960s.
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Imme Lammertink has been awarded an ABC Talent Grant for her  postdoc research project entitled 'Acquiring Language by Stats and Structure', which she will carry out at the ACLC starting in the autumn 2021.
Read more
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The European Federation of National Institutions for Language (EFNIL) has announced Anne-Mieke Thieme as one of the winners of the Master's Thesis Award.
Anne-Mieke won the award for her thesis entitled 'Multilingual The Hague: Municipal language policy, politics, and practice', supervised by Em. Prof. Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade at Leiden University.
EFNIL received 23 applications from 10 different countries written in 10 different languages covering a broad spectrum of topics such as bilingual and trilingual language acquisition, language ideologies, translation, dialects, endangered languages, and language attitudes.
The winning projects will be presented at the next EFNIL conference 8 October 2021.
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17 September 2021 | 16:15 -17:30
Sara Petrollino, University Lecturer at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, is the guest speaker at this ACLC seminar. The title and abstract of her talk will be published soon.
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Step-by-step instructions for grant applications
Applying for a grant requires adequate preparation, for which the Grant Team Humanities offers support at different stages of the process. The internal procedure and conditions for external grant applications has recently been updated. We have formulated new step-by-step instructions for both individual and consortium grant application, which can be found on the Grant Team website.
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Call for applications | AIHR PhD Finishing Fellowships
The Faculty of Humanities invites applications for PhD Finishing Fellowships, tenable from January 1, 2022. Deadline for applications: October 1, 2021.
Each fellow will be offered a temporary contract as a PhD for 0,5 fte and for a period of up to 12 months. They are required to deliver a completed dissertation (defined as "dissertation submitted to the examination committee") by the end of the fellowship period.
Eligibility
Only PhD candidates who are currently registered as self-funded PhD candidate at one of the AIHR Research Schools, and have been registered as such for the past two years are eligible to apply.
Applications by PhD candidates who have previously received a PhD fellowship or any substantial, multi-year scholarship from a university, funding body or other institution, in the Netherlands or abroad, will not be considered.
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Two calls for PhDs
Please note that two calls for proposals are currently open for PhD candidates, which you may find interesting:
- NWO Mozaïek 2.0, a PhD scholarship program aimed at the under-represented group of graduates with a migration background from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Central and South America and Turkey in the Netherlands. The procedure consists of a pre-proposal and a full proposal. Mosaic 2.0 is a science-wide program; any research topic can be eligible. Candidates do not submit the application themselves; this is done by an intended supervisor. NB. PhD candidates need to have the Dutch nationality or residence permit, and have graduated at a Dutch university.
Deadline: pre‐proposals 28 September; full proposals: 8 March.
- Data Science Centre, Interdisciplinary PhD Programme, 7 PhD positions to accelerate data driven interdisciplinary research within the University of Amsterdam. In this call, the aim is to foster research into new data science methods that help to tackle hard challenging problems in a given domain. Interdisciplinarity is achieved by joint supervision across faculties: one supervisor with core expertise in data science methods, the other with core expertise in the domain problem.
Deadline: September 23, 2021 at 17:00.
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