Núria Bosch

Hello! I’m Núria Bosch [ˈnuɾiə βɔsk], a second-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.

From April-July 2025, I am a short-term Doctoral Fellow at the DFG-funded NegLaB Collaborative Research Centre (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt), where I work 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 biolinguistics. In my work, I probe a so-called neo-emergentist approach to language acquisition and variation, which assumes a maximally impoverished Universal Grammar. I have a keen interest in interdisciplinary approaches to language.

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 negation and Negative Concord crosslinguistically.
• 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.