Núria Bosch

University of Cambridge • nb611 [at] cam.ac.uk • she/her

bridgesighs.jpg
Me, not in front of St John's Bridge of Sighs

Hello! I’m Núria Bosch [ˈnuɾiə βɔsk], a third-year PhD student in Linguistics at the University of Cambridge (St John’s College). I specialise in syntax and first language acquisition.

I’m supervised by Bert Vaux and Theresa Biberauer and I’m supported by an OOC AHRC DTP - St John’s studentship. I’m also an Honorary Cambridge Trust Scholar. My PhD project is outlined on the AHRC website.

During Fall 2025, I am a visiting student at the Department of Linguistics at New York University, sponsored by Ailís Cournane and Gary Thoms.

From April-July 2025, I was a short-term Doctoral Research Fellow at the DFG-funded NegLaB Collaborative Research Centre (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt), where I worked with Esther Rinke and Petra Schulz.

Before my PhD, I completed a BA and MPhil in Linguistics also at the University of Cambridge (St John’s College), supervised by Theresa Biberauer. You can find my full CV here.

I’m interested in syntax (theoretical, comparative, diachronic), language acquisition, and interdisciplinary approaches to language. My work explores a neo-emergentist generative approach to language acquisition and variation, which assumes a maximally impoverished Universal Grammar. I have a keen interest in comparative, multilingual and formal perspectives on syntactic acquisition.

Some of the projects I’ve worked on and/or I’m interested in include:

  • Acquisition of functional categories (including cartographic categories) from a neo-emergentist perspective.
  • Structure, variation and acquisition of the left periphery.
  • Foundations of functional/extended projections (theoretically and developmentally).
  • Acquisition of A’-dependencies crosslinguistically.
  • Acquisition of negation and Negative Concord crosslinguistically.
  • Acquisition of expletive subjects in West Germanic.
  • Acquisition of illocutionary complementisers in Ibero-Romance and Italian.
  • Relationship betweeen L1 (and L2) acquirers, developmental patterns and language change.
  • Applications of dynamical systems theory and category theory in linguistics.
  • Expressive language in Catalan and Spanish, and crosslinguistically.

When not doing linguistics, I can be found reading, listening to music, coding, travelling and following Barcelona’s football games (or, more rarely, playing football). I’m originally from Ripoll, a small town in the north of Catalonia, next to the Pyrenees and near the French border.

news

Nov, 2025 My paper ‘Categorial granularity in syntactic acquisition: a multilingual corpus study on the left periphery’ has been accepted to Glossa.
Sep, 2025 I’ve been invited to give a talk at TreLinLab (Università di Trento), 29 May 2026!
Sep, 2025 Our BUCLD 49 Proceedings paper has been published, titled ‘On Another Topic, How Do Acquisition Orders Vary? The Left-Periphery and Topicalization in Bilingual and Monolingual Acquisition’.
Aug, 2025 I’ll present a talk (with Theresa Biberauer) at BUCLD 50: “Children selectively drop expletive subjects: the role of argumenthood and referentiality”.
Jul, 2025 Our abstract (with Theresa Biberauer) was accepted at NELS 56 for a talk! We will present “On the formal heterogeneity of expletive subjects: new insights from acquisition”.