My research focuses on syntactic change 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 syntax-pragmatics interface, as well as the role of language contact on syntactic change. This page lists an overview of projects I have been involved in. A full list of my publications can be found here.
As part of the DFG-funded Research Unit "Structuring the Input in Language Processing, Acquisition and Change" (SILPAC)
Starting in 2022, 8 research projects in 5 German universities and Mercator Fellow Charles Yang (University of Pennsylvania) will create structures of interdisciplinary linguistic research in which researchers specialised in the two fields of historical linguistics (H) and psycholinguistics (P) closely collaborate with the goal of providing an empirically and theoretically well-grounded explanation of the links between language processing, acquisition and change, informed by mathematical modelling (M).
In subproject H3 I investigated, together with the principal investigators Prof. Dr. Carola Trips (University of Mannheim) and PhD student Lena Kaltenbach (University of Mannheim), what the lexico-semantic contribution of verbs copied from French is, and how this interacts with (changes in) the native syntax, argument structure and morphology. By means of quantitative investigation of diachronic lexical verb semantics, we show that French result verbs are of a unique semantic type and we show that this is what blocks integration into the native s-framing system that is employed to express resultativity, such as verb-particle constructions. I furthermore found that this strong tendency for French verbs to express a state has repercusions for how verbs are used syntactically. French (Result) verbs occur significantly more frequently in passive constructions compared to native verbs, which contributes to increased productivity of the long passive.
Struik, Tara & Lena Kaltenbach. Forthcoming. The results of contact: tracing changes in resultativity encoding in the history of English in contact with Old
French.
Trips, Carola, Tara Struik & Lena Kaltenbach. Forthcoming. Language contact and language change. Contribution to International Encyclopedia of
Language and Linguistics, 3rd Edition.
Struik, Tara, Kaltenbach, Lena, & Lang, Susanne. 2025. Roots & Results (RoRe): A diachronic database of English verbal lexical semantics. University of Mannheim. http://osf.io/6hc93
The West-Germanic language family is characterized by a remarkable variation in word order. The continental varieties, including Dutch and German, have largely Object-Verb (OV) word order, whereas English has strict Verb-Object (VO) word order. It is intriguing that such closely related languages show such a fundamental word order distinction, the more so when considering that the older stages of the languages show varying mixtures of OV and VO word order. This variation raises many questions regarding its motivation and its syntactic status, both from a synchronic and diachronic perspective.
My PhD thesis (funded by the Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University and supervised by Ans van Kemenade and Olaf Koeneman) approaches OV/VO variation from a comparative and diachronic perspective, building on the hypothesis that OV/VO variation is motivated by information structure. By means of a series of detailed corpus studies on the earlier stages of English, Dutch, Low German and High German it shows that - while the variation in earlier English, Dutch, and German is structurally similar - the way that information structure governs the OV/VO alternation in the earliest attested language stages already signals the difference between English as a VO language, and Dutch and German as an OV language; in early English VO is the pragmatically neutral word order, whereas in early Dutch and German OV is pragmatically neutral. These findings feed into a novel antisymmetric analysis, in which the variation is derived in the same way for all West-Germanic languages, but which is flexible enough to allow for variation between the individual languages.
Struik, Tara. 2022. OV/VO variation and information structure in Old Saxon and Middle Low German. Journal of Historical Syntax 6(1), 1-36. https://doi.org/10.18148/hs/2022.v6i1.127
Struik, Tara & Gert-Jan Schoenmakers. 2023. When information structure exploits syntax: The relation between the loss of VO and scrambling in Dutch. Journal of Linguistics 59(3), 655-690. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226722000172
Struik, Tara & Ans van Kemenade. 2020. On the givenness of OV word order: a (re)examination of OV/VO variation in Old English. English Language and
Linguistics 24(1), 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1360674318000187
Struik, Tara & Ans van Kemenade. 2022. Information structure and OV word order in Old and Middle English: a phase-based approach. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 25(1), 79-114. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10828-022-09131-1
Struik, Tara. 2022. Information Structure Triggers for Word Order Variation and Change: The OV/VO Alternation in the West Germanic Languages.
Amsterdam: LOT Publications. https://dx.medra.org/10.48273/LOT0616 (reviewed by Mark de Vries in Nederlandse Taalkunde,
https://doi.org/10.5117/NEDTAA2024.2.008.VRIE )
Newspaper article in Dutch newspaper NRC: click!