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Publications and Talks

Scientific Output

Scientific Output

Publications, Theses, & Talks

Publications:

If you are feeling generous enough to cite me, please cite me as Benjamin L. Sluckin in your reference section and (Sluckin "year") in your prose.

2025 *

Revisiting the syntax and development of Kiezdeutsch V3: a new perspective. In Journal of Germanic Linguistics 37(1), DOI: 10.1017/S1470542724000114

2024 *

The covert perceiver in English Locative Inversion: an alternative to expletive pro. In Evolutionary Linguistic Theory 6(1-2),pp. 194–245, DOI: 10.1075/elt.00058.slu

Submitted (under revision)

Everywhere here can say this: The English locative impersonal, with Itamar Kastner (Edniburgh), submitted to English Language and Linguistics

2023 *

Non-canonical V3 and Resumption in Kiezdeutsch, with Oliver Bunk. In de Clercq, Karen et al. (eds.), Adverbial Resumption in Verb Second Languages , pp. 327-354. Oxford:OUP

2021

Non-canonical subjects and subject positions: locative inversion, V2-violations, and feature inheritance. PhD Thesis, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

2021 *

Locative Inversion in Germanic and Romance: A conspiracy theory, with Silvio Cruschina (Helsinki) and Fabienne Martin (HU-Berlin), In Sam Wolfe & Christine M. Salvesen (eds.), Continuity and Variation in Germanic and Romance, pp. 165-194.Oxford: OUP.

OUP link      Preprint on Researchgate

* = peer reviewed


Work in Progress:

In Prep:

Locative Inversion in the history of English: innovative redistribution of continuous features (working title)

In Prep:

Agentive unaccusatives or agentivizing pPs (working title)


Conference/Workshop presentations: (email for a copy if it's not on my ResearchGate)

2022,
June

Locative Inversion in the history of English: a spoonful of innovation and a pinch of continuity @ The Theory and Historical Development of Expletives (and non-referential arguments) workshop, University of Bochum.

2021,
May

with Itamark Kastner, Everywhere in the UK quantifies over individuals: a new locative impersonal subject @ Syntactic Change in Progress workshop at DiGS 22, University of Konstanz.

2021,
January

with Itamar Kastner, A locative human impersonal subject: Metonymy-driven change at the interfaces @ Language Change: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem.

2020,
October

with Itamark Kastner, Everywhere we checked talks like this @ University of Glasgow.

2020,
April

with Itamark Kastner, Everywhere in the world quantifies over individuals @ Paper Brown Bag, NYU, New York.

2019,
October

Locative Inversion is a conspiracy: a formal typology @ Sentence Grammar/Discourse Grammar IV, University of Oslo, Norway.

2019,
January

Some methodological and theoretical concerns when dealing with a "residual" V2 pattern @ Secrets of Success. Or: How to preserve a Verb Second word order? University of Oslo, Norway.

2018,
June

Revisiting V3 in Kiezdeutsch: a preverbal subject constraint across different types of V3 @ DiGS, 2018 in York.

2018,
April

Information Structure Change in an Emerging Grammar : V1 and V3 in Kiezdeutsch, Colloque Information Structure and Language Change, Normandie Université, Université de Caen Normandie, France.

2018,
January

Single Specifiers and Phasehood in the Voice/vP domain and beyond: problems for SOV V2, presented at ' PhD Workshop', Leibniz-ZAS, Berlin, Germany.

2017,
October

V2, non-V2, and resumption: A comparison of American Norwegian and Kiezdeutsch, with Artemis Alexiadou and Terje Lohndal, @ V3 and Resumptive Adverbials, University of Ghent, Belgium.

2017,
April

Verb third in Kiezdeutsch: The development of an (optional) subject position?, presented at 'Manchester Forum in Linguistics', University of Manchester, UK.

2017,
March

*Locatives, V2, and Subject Positions: FinP as a Gatekeeper in the History of English, Presented at 'DAAD-University of Cambridge Research Hub for German Studies: Research network 'Morphosyntactic change through corpora in German and beyond, Workshop 2: Complementizers and the left periphery', University of Cambridge, UK.

2016,
October

Feature Economy and Grammar Competition in language and dialect contact, presented at ‘Language Contact from an I Language Perspective’, IKER(Center for the Study of the Basque Language and its Texts), San Sebastian-Donostia.

2016,
September

Understanding exaptation from an acquisitionist parametric perspective, presented at Linguistik Meetup Berlin-Potsdam, FU-Berlin.

2016,
July

The exaptive reanalysis of V2 as locative inversion in the history of English: an emergentist parametric approach, presented at SUM-UP 2016, Summer School on Word order variation and change. Diachronic insights into Germanic diversity”, Potsdam.

2016,
March

Cross-linguistic influence in the word order of heritage speakers: thoughts on the syntax-discourse interface. University of Cambridge.


Theses and dissertations:

2021 PhD Thesis

Non-canonical subjects and subject positions: locative inversion, V2-violations, and feature inheritance. PhD Thesis, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Dr. hc Artemis Alexiadou (1), Prof. Dr. Eric Fuß (2), Prof. David Willis (3)

2016 MPhil Thesis

Exaptation across grammatical domains: a generative account of source contexts, mechanisms and outcomes. MPhil thesis, University of Cambridge, Supervisor: Dr David Willis

2015 Undergraduate Thesis

Zurück in die Zukunft: a socio-historical linguistic account of the development of the future tense in German. BA dissertation, University of Manchester


Manuscripts:

2017

Language Contact as an Accelerator of Change: The Diffusion of the werden Future Tense Periphrasis in German (Updated version of BA thesis)