Doctoral Position in African Languages Announced
The Department of Languages and Literatures has announced a doctoral position within the research project “Expressing Time without Verbs: Copula Constructions in Southern Bantu in a Comparative Perspective.”
The project investigates how nouns can function as predicates in the Bantu language Xhosa, where tense can be expressed directly on the noun with the help of copula prefixes that vary according to noun class.
It maps out which tenses and inflectional patterns are possible, how the construction is used and interpreted in interaction, and how it may have developed historically.
The work adopts a comparative perspective, both within the Bantu language family and in a broader typological context, and draws on fieldwork as well as a spoken Xhosa corpus developed by Språkbanken Text.
The project is funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR 2025-01646).