MapLE project

Call for collaborators MapLE project

The NWO Vici project ‘Mapping Linguistic Epistemicity’ (MapLE) invites 5 collaborators to help with data collection and analysis. Come join the MapLE team!

Description of the project

When people communicate, they not only exchange information, but they also indicate how the speaker’s and addressee’s knowledge relate to that information. What is the source of the information, how certain is the speaker of it, is it unexpected for the speaker or addressee? Interestingly, the linguistic strategies to express these aspects are typically multifunctional, indicating fuzzy boundaries between the concepts of source, certainty etc. For example, saying ‘They DID eat it’ can indicate a contrast with the addressee thinking they didn’t, but also that this is surprising, and that the speaker is certain. All the concepts related to the speaker’s and addressee’s knowledge are thus interconnected in our mind: together they form one conceptual space (‘epistemicity’). How is that space organised? And is it the same for speakers of all languages?

While previous analyses unfruitfully focus on rigid categories (such as ‘mirativity’ and ‘evidentiality’), the current project takes advantage of the fuzzy boundaries to create a network map of this intersubjective epistemicity. We will investigate a number of African languages, which have not had a chance to contribute to this area. For these languages, we study how they express the detailed aspects of the speaker’s and addressee’s knowledge in relation to the information exchanged.

Given that concepts that are expressed together must be more closely related than those that are not, the resulting data can be used for a proximity network analysis. This then forms a map that shows how the human mind organises the conceptual space of epistemicity, and by comparing crosslinguistically, we can discover to what extent our conceptual organisation is the same or influenced by the language(s) we speak.

The full description and further information can be found here: https://epistemicity.net/about/.

Tasks

Within this project, your tasks will be to

  1. create an inventory of the detailed aspects of and linguistic strategies for expressing epistemicity in the language you speak and/or study (description and analysis), based on interactional data and diagnostics, and
  2. (co-)write an article on the analysis.

The team will kick things off with a joint training week in April 2026. There is one year for data collection, and the activities are expected to be finalised by 1 September 2027. For further specifics, please contact us via maple@hum.leidenuniv.nl.

Compensation

Collaborators will be financially compensated on a task basis (not hourly), and equipment for the research is separately provided by the project (recorder, external drive, etc.). The compensation is determined in mutual agreement, reflecting experience, commitment, and local standards.

Requirements

We’re hoping to find team members with the following background and mindset. If you bring something different but relevant, we’d love to hear from you too!

  • You have an MA or PhD in (descriptive) linguistics;
  • You have experience with gathering data from native speakers of an African language;
  • Ideally you speak one or more African languages as your first language;
  • You are interested in epistemicity and its expression in the languages of the world;
  • You work in an organised, systematic way.

Application

If this sounds like a good chance for you, please send the following documents to maple@hum.leidenuniv.nl by the 30th of November (midnight any timezone):

  • Curriculum vitae, specifying
    • the languages you speak and to which level;
    • the language(s) you work on or have worked on;
    • your experience in linguistic fieldwork/data elicitation;
    • your experience in linguistic data management.
  • A letter describing (ideally with concrete examples, and shorter is better)
    • your motivation;
    • the way you work best;
    • your communication and collaboration style;
    • (possibly) what makes your language interesting in terms of epistemicity.
  • A writing sample (can be a published work or manuscript)

Candidates selected for an interview will hear from us by December 15th, and interviews will be conducted on December 18th.

For any further questions, please contact us at maple@hum.leidenuniv.nl.