Tara Struik

Linguist

Photo credit: Katrin Glückler

Welcome!

I am currently an academic staff member at the University of Mannheim, where I was previously employed as a post-doc within the Structuring the Input in Language Processing, Acquisition and Change (SILPAC) Research Unit, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. I defended my PhD at Radboud University, Nijmegen in 2022.

My research focuses on morphosyntactic developments in the West Germanic languages. I combine quantitative approaches with formal (Minimalist) syntactic theory. I am particularly interested in language variation and change at the interfaces, especially the syntax-pragmatics and syntax-semantic interfaces, as well as how language contact and language acquisition shape morphosyntactic change. You can read more about my research here.

My complete cv is available here.

Recent updates

New paper out! (01-04-2026)
I contributed a chapter on syntactic change at the interfaces for the Wiley Blackwell Companion to Diachronic and Historical Linguistics. You can read it here.

Two talks at DiGS27 (17-03-2026)

I will present two paper at DiGS27, held at the University of Padua between 16-19 June 2026. In the first paper 'Supported by French: a TSP perspective on the grammaticalization of the English (long) passive' I will present a Tolerance/Sufficiency Principle analysis of the grammaticalization of the long passive in the history of English, and the supporting role French played in its development. The second paper 'The psycholinguistics of historical bilinguals: A production-based study of code-switching and syntactic convergence in Early English and French contact' is a collaboration with Carola Trips and Lena Kaltenbach and reports on the outcomes of the H3 project in SILPAC and presents a psycho-linguistically informed account of the processes at play in medieval English-French contact. The complete DiGS programme is available here.

My PhD thesis entitled Information Structure Triggers for Word Order Variation and Change: The OV/VO Alternation in the West Germanic languages appeared in print through LOT Publications on 3 March 2022. It can be downloaded (open access) here.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse