The DFG-funded Research Training Group Dimensions of Constructional Space at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg is seeking to appoint

1 doctoral researcher for project 6: Spanish quotative constructions in oral narratives – an Interactional Construction Grammar approach

The PhD researchers will be employed on a 65% basis on an TV-L13 scale (which amounts to a starting salary of about €3000 per month before tax) for three years, starting 1 October 2025.

More details about the Projects 2025 and the Research Questions can be found here: https://www.cxg.phil.fau.eu/

Deadline for application is 22 June 2025.

Selection criteria:

• MA in Romance philology (Spanish and/or French) or a related discipline
• previous academic experience relevant to the project;
• ability to work independently and as part of a team;
• fluency in English as all group activities will be conducted in English

We particularly encourage applications from women and minority candidates.

Application procedure

Informal enquiries and applications for the positions should be submitted by email to project-cxgram@fau.de. The subject line should have the following format: Application PhD project no. 6

Applications should be in English and should contain the following:

• an academic CV;
• a cover letter explaining how you meet the recruitment criteria
• an academic writing sample in English (e.g. MA dissertation, essay, or a review of the literature relevant to the project);
• MA diploma
• details (name, affiliation, email, and relationship to you) of 2-3 academic referees.

The interviews will be conducted via Zoom.

Project description

Spanish quotative constructions in oral narratives – an Interactional Construction Grammar approach

This project will investigate how speakers use the constructional resources of Romance languages (with a special focus on Spanish) to accomplish evaluation and stance taking in oral narratives. It is designed as a contribution to the emergent new field of Interactional Construction Grammar (cf. Fischer 2006, Imo 2015, Langström 2025). The research will be based on oral narratives in Spanish (with the possibility to include German or French data). According to Labov & Waletzky’s (1997) classical account, oral narratives contain both referential information, in which the participants refer to the chain of events that makes up the story, and evaluative information, in which they assess these events from a subjective point of view. These types of information are fundamentally distinguished on an utterance-by-utterance basis, based on the possibility (or not) of changing the chronological order of utterances without altering the story.
However, previous work within the emergent field of Interactional Construction Grammar has shown that grammatical constructions within referential segments can actually contribute to the expression of subjective evaluations: for example, different verbal constructions used to introduce reported thought in German and French can express affective stances or epistemic evaluations regarding the reported thought act, not only based on lexical choices between different verba sentiendi, but also on tense (cf. Fiedler’s 2024 study of the use of ich denke (mir) / ich dachte mir and je me suis dit / je me disais und je suis là / j’étais là). These uses are often linked to particular action formats: for example, the construction je suis là, when used in present tense, indicates a strong negative stance and is typically used in complaints (ibid.), which is not the case for the same construction in imperfect tense (j’étais là).
The project aims at exploring the interface between grammar, interaction and pragmatics in oral narratives based on the Erlangen VIOLIN corpus, which contains transcripts of recordings of interviews with Spanish and (to a lesser extent) French and German speaking migrants in which they recount critical communication incidents, i.e. situations in which they felt hurt, intimidated, or otherwise negatively affected by the verbal behaviour of their interlocutors. Reported speech and thought are frequently used in these narratives, serving as both an object and a means of evaluation and stance taking. The project will use quotative constructions as a starting point in order to delve into the contribution of grammatical construction to evaluation and stance taking in narrative discourse. However, other constructions may also be addressed.

Fiedler, Sophia. 2024. The Grammar-in-use of Direct Reported Thought in French and German. An Interactional and Multimodal Analysis. Dissertation, University of Hamburg.
Fischer, Kerstin (2006). Konstruktionsgrammatik und Interaktion. Konstruktionsgrammatik: Von Der Anwendung Zur Theorie, 129–146.
Imo, Wolfgang. (2015). Interactional construction grammar. Linguistics Vanguard, 1(1), 69–77.
Labov, William & Joshua Waletzky. 1967. “Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience”. In June Helm (ed.), Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts. Proceedings of the 1966 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society, pp. 12-44. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Lindström, Jan. (2025). Constructions in spoken interaction. In M. Fried & K. Nikiforidou (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Construction Grammar (pp. 309–334). Cambridge University Press.