You will contribute to a systematic quantitative corpus study of differential object marking in Spanish. There are two main tasks. The first is to investigate and implement methods that automatically annotate relevant linguistic properties that predict the use of differential object marking in Spanish, such as animacy and definiteness. A previous research assistant has already developed a method to automatically identify instances of differential object marking in Spanish, but this can be further developed. The second is to perform manual or semi-automatic annotation of sentences containing differential object marking and the features that predict its use. After doing these two tasks, depending on the remaining time, another task may be to statistically analyse the data that was collected.

Part of the research has already been carried out by a previous student assistant, so you will be following up on existing work.

You have an interest in academic research and are familiar with quantitative methods in linguistics. You have experience with text processing in Python as well as a high level of Spanish proficiency. You are familiar with relevant linguistic concepts, such as animacy, givenness and differential object marking, and are able to identify them in empirical data.

As an UvA employee, you’ll be able to work in the employee areas of Lab42 (the building of the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at Science Park). Through weekly update meetings, you will gain practical experience with how research projects develop. If you are interested, you can join us to relevant academic events such as the Computational Linguistics Seminar and the Corpus-based and/or Computational Approaches to Language and Literature (CCALL) events.

This is a unique opportunity to work at the Faculty of Humanities. The duration of the employment contract is from 1 February – 30 June 2026, for 8 hours per week. Your salary will be between € 3.084 - € 3.141 gross per month based on a full time employment of 38h per week. This is exlcuding 8% holiday allowance and 8.3% percent end of the year bonus. The Collective Labour Agreement of Dutch Universities is applicable.