Tara Struik

Dr. Tara Struik is an Academic Staff Member at the University of Mannheim, affiliated with the School of Humanities and the Department of English. Her research focuses on historical syntax, information structure, and word order variation in Germanic languages.

Her work explores the interplay between syntactic architecture, discourse constraints, and historical language change, particularly in early Germanic varieties like Old English, Old Saxon, and Middle Low German. Through corpus-based and theoretical analyses, she investigates phenomena such as V2 movement, OV/VO variation, and the role of information structure in syntactic evolution.

Tara Struik has published extensively on diachronic syntax, including the creation of the Roots & Results (RoRe) database for English lexical semantics. Her articles highlight cross-linguistic comparisons between English and Dutch, emphasizing discourse-driven syntactic shifts. She teaches and supervises projects in historical linguistics and English language studies.