Dr Tamara Rathcke, Senior Lecturer in Linguistics for the Department of English Language & Linguistics, is a member of a European team of researchers who have recently been awarded a research grant from the Belgian funding body FWO. In collaboration with Professor Anne Breitbarth (Ghent), Professor Claudia Crocco (Ghent) and Dr Jacopo Garzonio (Padova), Dr Rathcke will contribute to the a project entitled Prosodic cues to syntactic reanalysis: experimentally tracking Jespersen’s cycle in progress.

This four year project will employ a PhD student to study, under the team’s supervision, how prosody interacts with syntactic structure at different stages of an ongoing syntactic change. Innovatively, it will do so using experimental methods, studying the interaction of syntax and prosody.

Besides contributing a new dimension to the modelling of language change by looking at the interaction between syntax and prosody, this project will devise new methods for the experimental investigation of syntactic change, which may eventually be expanded to the study of other instances of ongoing change.

Congratulations to Dr Rathcke and her European team of collaborators on this achievement.