I have worked on English from the medeival period to today, Early New High German and Present Day German and Kiezdeutsch, as well as contemporary and historical Romance (French and Italian) and some Hebrew. My research concerns morphosyntactic syntactic variation and change from a formal perspective. I focus on historical and contemporary West Germanic languages - primarily English and German - with an eye toward broader cross-linguistic comparison where necessary.
I am interested in Verb-Second (V2) and inversion phenomena and especially how they have developed/changed over time and what factors are responsible for this. I also investigate the nature of linguistic innovation in different types of bi/multilingual acuisition scenarios in historical and contemporary data. Moreover, I am particularly excited by historical variation and change that appears moderated by language/dialect contact events, e.g. English in contact with Old Norse or Norman French, and historical inter/intra speaker variation, e.g. historical sociolinguistics.
Finally, I am also interested in Unaccusativity and Argument Structure, Subjecthood and Locatives, the Syntax-Pragmatics interface.
I make use of both diachronic and synchronic methodologies to ask and answer three basic questions of any phenomenon I work on:
I am especially concerned with reanalysis phenomena in which either existing linguistic elements and structures gain novel functions or new structures emerge without an ancestor. A particular focus of my research programme has been instances where some interaction between the syntax and another grammatical interface, e.g., information structure or semantics/pragmatics appear to drive change. To these ends, I chiefly use corpus-based methods to answer questions about (morpho)syntactic change.
In a nutshell, my research programme focuses on the innovation and maintenance of non-canonical structures, asking what conditions facilitate their existence, often seemingly at odds with the needs or limitations of the linguistic system. An overview of my research programme is described below.
I am interested in variation and changes in grammar over time and the underlying structure of that grammar. I ask questions like, how are particular words and sentences formed and how and why do they vary and change over time? This might be visible as word order changes or words looking or sounding different. It might also be invisible and we are able to tell because, while things might look the same, the meaning has become subtly different. We might see both of these scenarios together.
LI sentences are particularly marked in English because it otherwise shows subject-verb order quite strictly, with some notable and systematic exceptions. However, this constraint was weaker in the history of English, when German-like verb-second orders where possible. A general consensus is that LI emerged in Early Modern English, yet such claims have not been based large-scale data analysis and have not addressed the syntactic facts of the construction. Thus, pertinent empirical and theoretical questions are a) if large amounts of linguistic data confirm or refute an EModE emergence, and b) how such a structure managed to survive and apparently find new life as a special type of presentational sentence, seemingly at odds with canonical word order. To answer these questions, I have drawn on the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English and modelled the relative frequency of the pattern text-by-text from Old English to into Modern English (c.1915) (Sluckin 2021c, Sluckin in Prep). This work has so far been able to confirm the superficial result that LI is clearly recognisable as special in EmodE, yet closer analysis of the data shows that LI-like structures resisted a mass reduction in inversion structures as early as Late Middle English. From a theoretical perspective, I argue that this is due to separable and shifting subject requirements in English and the reanalysis of an otherwise defunct historical silent expletive as an perception event-like argument tied to an evidential interpretation. I am currently preparing this research as a manuscript for submission to a peer reviewed journal, as my published work on this so far has been synchronic (Sluckin et al. 2021).
My dissertation addressed syntactic structures involving non-canonical subjects and non-canonical subject positions, investigating in particular Locative Inversion (LI) in English, French, Italian, and Hebrew, e.g., out of the hole came a rabbit. In LI a spatio-deictic XP appears in the preverbal canonical subject position, while the canonical nominative subject DP surfaces postverbally. I compare the distribution of different covert and overt arguments participating in LI and the availability of LI in embedded and matrix contexts crosslinguistically. From a theoretical perspective, I have developed a theory of subject requirements which is able to account for the breadth of investigated crosslinguistic variation in LI. To these ends, I make use of finite differences across C and T in the distribution of D, ϕ, and discourse-related δ-features (cf. Miyagawa 2017) features via different inheritance options from the phase head. I demonstrate that the presence of non-canonical subjects in LI can be derived via variation in the placement of a δ-feature with a specification for Subject of Predication orthogonal to typical EPP requirements related to D and ϕ.
A further fundamental question underlying my diachronic work is how particularly challenging acquisition scenarios, for example, different types of language contact interact with language change. My work here (Sluckin 2021, Sluckin & Bunk in press) has focused on non-canonical verb-third orders in Kiezdeutsch, an urban-contact variety of German, which systematically violate German’s strict verb-second requirement. In this project, I created a large database of such sentences in the literature (cf. Walkden 2017, Wiese & Müller 2018) using the annotated corpus of Kiezdeutsch (KiDKo). I compared non-canonical verb-third order with unremarkable verb-third resumption strategies, e.g., Left Dislocation; I find that Kiezdeutsch shows the same constraint across all verb-third orders, namely that the preverbal element must always be a subject or akin to one. In an attempt to explain the emergence of this tendency, I have combined analysis of meta-data concerning speakers' status as a bilingual or monolingual and the general findinfs from literature on sequential bilingualism. In short, I argue that the Kiezdeutsch V3 data fit into a wider patterns that the delayed acquisition of verb-second syntax can lead to more V3. I developed a novel syntactic bleeding account of the German and Kiezdeutsch Left Periphery accounting for the facts and suggest a series of reanalyses by which the subject constraint may have come about.