CNRS Research Associate in language sciences

CNRS Research Associate

The Institut Jean-Nicod (IJN) is seeking to support applications in language sciences to Research Associate (Chargé de Recherche) positions at the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS).

CNRS Research Associate positions are full-time permanent positions intended for candidates in their early to mid career. Applicants must hold a PhD by the application deadline. Knowledge of French is not required.

Although CNRS recruits researchers by way of a national competition, applicants are encouraged to select one or more research labs to which they would like to be assigned, and support is crucial for a successful application. The present call pertains to this preliminary step of lab support by the Institut Jean-Nicod ; the official CNRS application will be done at a later stage (the deadline to submit applications is normally early January, notice that for the 2024 recruitment the deadline was unusually late – Feb. 9, 2024). We would accompany and advise candidates we support in their CNRS application, itself a competitive process.

Located at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), the Institut Jean-Nicod has 29 permanent faculty members, working on analytic philosophy, linguistics, and social cognition, with a unifying theme of the human mind and the nature of representations. 

Linguistics at the Institut Jean-Nicod has historically been very strong in theoretical linguistics, formal semantics and pragmatics, and linguistically informed philosophical logic ; in recent years, it has extended its focus to include topics such as psycholinguistics (esp. experimental semantics and pragmatics), sign language, reasoning, computational linguistics, probabilistic modeling of pragmatics, and superlinguistics. 

The Institut Jean-Nicod is interested in supporting a limited number of applicants, with an excellent research record and motivation to develop a project that would fit the lab’s areas of inquiry.

Prospective applicants that wish to be supported by the Institut Jean-Nicod are invited to contact the lab by sending a CV (including a publication list and at least the name of 2 references, no recommendation letter are required) and a short description of their medium-long term research agenda (2-pages excluding references). The two documents must be sent in pdf format to 

To ensure full consideration, please submit your application by Nov. 15

Candidates that are considered for support will be interviewed starting as early as possible and not later than the second half of November. 

The Institut Jean-Nicod Linguistic College