I am a formal syntactician working on morphosyntactic variation and change. My approach combines theoretical syntax with quantitative evidence from three sources: synchronic corpora, diachronic corpora, and experimental data – chiefly large-scale acceptability studies. Increasingly I also draw on sociolinguistic methodology, coding for speaker- and community-level variables alongside the structural factors of interest. This range lets me ask not only what a structure is, but how it is distributed across speakers and how it came to be.
Empirically, I work on English from the medieval period to the present day, on Early New High German, Present-Day German and Kiezdeutsch, and on contemporary and historical Romance (French and Italian), with some Hebrew. My primary focus is historical and contemporary West Germanic – above all English and German – with cross-linguistic comparison where it sharpens the analysis.
My interests cluster around Verb-Second (V2) and inversion phenomena; subjecthood and non-canonical subjects; locatives; voice and argument structure (middles, modal passives, unaccusativity); impersonality; and the syntax–semantics/pragmatics interface. I am especially interested in how such structures emerge and survive under pressure: language and dialect contact (e.g. English in contact with Old Norse or Norman French), bi- and multilingual acquisition, and historical inter- and intra-speaker variation – that is, historical sociolinguistics.
I use both diachronic and synchronic methods to ask three basic questions of any phenomenon I work on:
I am especially concerned with reanalysis: cases where existing elements acquire new functions, or new structures emerge without a clear ancestor. A recurring theme is change driven by the interaction of syntax with another interface – information structure, semantics, or pragmatics. To address these questions I combine corpus-based methods for (morpho)syntactic change with experimental work that tests the synchronic reflexes of the same phenomena, and, where relevant, sociolinguistic coding to locate variation in the speech community.
In a nutshell, my research programme concerns the innovation and maintenance of non-canonical structures: what conditions allow them to exist, often seemingly at odds with the needs or limitations of the linguistic system. An overview of my research programme is described below.
I study how grammar varies and changes over time, and the hidden structure behind it. I ask how particular words and sentences are built, and how and why they vary and change. Sometimes this is visible – as changes in word order, or in how words look and sound; sometimes it is invisible, when things look the same but the meaning has shifted subtly. To find out, I combine large historical text collections, present-day data, and language experiments in which speakers tell me what does and does not sound natural – and I pay attention to who those speakers are, since age, background, and growing up with more than one language can all matter.
Locative Inversion (LI) sentences are particularly marked in English because it otherwise shows subject–verb order quite strictly, with some notable and systematic exceptions. This constraint was weaker earlier in the history of English, when German-like verb-second orders were possible. The general consensus is that LI emerged in Early Modern English, yet such claims have not been based on large-scale data analysis and have not addressed the syntactic facts of the construction. Two questions therefore arise: (a) whether large amounts of data confirm or refute an EModE emergence, and (b) how such a structure managed to survive and find new life as a special type of presentational sentence, seemingly at odds with canonical word order. Drawing on the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English, I have modelled the relative frequency of the pattern text-by-text from Old English into Modern English (c. 1915) (Sluckin 2021c, Sluckin in prep.). This work confirms that LI is clearly recognisable as special by EModE, but closer analysis shows that LI-like structures resisted the broader reduction of inversion as early as Late Middle English. Theoretically, I argue that this follows from separable and shifting subject requirements in English, together with the reanalysis of an otherwise defunct silent expletive as a perception-event argument tied to an evidential interpretation. I am preparing this work as a manuscript for a peer-reviewed journal, complementing my published synchronic work on the construction (Sluckin et al. 2021).
My dissertation addressed syntactic structures involving non-canonical subjects and non-canonical subject positions, focusing on LI in English, French, Italian, and Hebrew, e.g. out of the hole came a rabbit. In LI a spatio-deictic XP occupies the preverbal canonical subject position while the nominative subject DP surfaces postverbally. I compare the distribution of covert and overt arguments participating in LI, and the availability of LI in matrix and embedded contexts, cross-linguistically. I develop a theory of subject requirements that accounts for this variation by manipulating the distribution of D, φ, and discourse-related δ-features across C and T (cf. Miyagawa 2017) via different inheritance options from the phase head. I show that non-canonical subjects in LI can be derived through variation in the placement of a δ-feature specified for Subject of Predication, orthogonal to the EPP requirements associated with D and φ.
A further question underlying my diachronic work is how challenging acquisition scenarios – in particular different types of language contact – interact with language change. This strand (Sluckin 2025, Sluckin & Bunk 2023) concerns non-canonical verb-third orders in Kiezdeutsch, an urban contact variety of German that systematically violates German’s strict verb-second requirement. I built a large database of such sentences from the literature (cf. Walkden 2017, Wiese & Müller 2018) and the annotated Kiezdeutsch corpus (KiDKo), comparing non-canonical verb-third with unremarkable verb-third resumption strategies such as Left Dislocation. I find that Kiezdeutsch shows the same constraint across all verb-third orders: the preverbal element must be a subject or akin to one. Crucially, I integrate the sociolinguistic setting – multilingualism and child language acquisition in urban contact communities – by combining speaker metadata (bilingual vs. monolingual status) with the literature on sequential bilingualism, arguing that the delayed acquisition of verb-second syntax can lead to more verb-third. I develop a syntactic bleeding account of the German and Kiezdeutsch left periphery and suggest a series of reanalyses by which the subject constraint may have come about.
A growing strand of my work concerns voice and argument structure, in particular periphrastic middles and modal passives. With Eric Fuß (Sluckin & Fuß, under review) I analyse the German [gehen + zu-infinitive] construction, arguing that it is neither a periphrastic anticausative nor a canonical modal passive but a structurally distinct periphrastic realisation of the middle voice: modal gehen is a functional raising head selecting a voiceless, eventive vP, which derives its restriction to accomplishments and its dispositional interpretation. Combining synchronic syntax with historical corpus data from the 15th to the 20th century, we show that the construction emerged through a two-stage grammaticalisation pathway, from lexical motion verb to functional raising head. In a related solo project (in progress) I examine modal passives in Italian, focusing on how dispositional and deontic modality interact within them, broadening the cross-Germanic and Romance picture of how voice and modality are built periphrastically.
In ongoing collaborative work I investigate the argument structure of tough-movement (e.g. this problem is tough to solve), combining theoretical analysis with experimental acceptability data. The project centres on the role of Voice and on the status of the construction’s implicit argument – whether the understood participant is best captured by an implicit external argument and/or PRO. By testing how speakers’ judgements track these configurations, the work ties the syntax of tough-predicates to broader questions about implicit arguments, Voice, and non-canonical dependencies.
With Itamar Kastner I document and analyse a previously undescribed phenomenon: impersonal [Q + -where] in English, where forms such as everywhere serve as [+human] impersonal subjects, as in everywhere in the UK loves Marmite (= everyone). On the basis of a large-scale acceptability study (Sluckin & Kastner, resubmitted after revisions) we show that the impersonal reading requires overt reference to a large location, and that it is more readily accepted by UK than US speakers, and by younger speakers in particular. The design coded for a range of sociolinguistic variables alongside the structural factors, locating the variation in the speech community as well as in the grammar. In a companion theoretical paper (Sluckin, under review) I argue that the impersonal use arises from a distinct nominal configuration – a silent, human-descriptive root selected by a relational categoriser – rather than from lexical polysemy.
Across these projects I design and run large-scale acceptability studies and analyse corpus and experimental data statistically, treating synchronic experimental evidence, synchronic corpus evidence, and diachronic corpus evidence as complementary windows on the same questions. This methodological breadth – formal syntax informed by diachronic corpora, synchronic corpora, controlled experiments, and sociolinguistic variation – is central to how I work.