publications 📝

The development of functional categories crosslinguistically is an extensively studied and debated topic (i.a., Radford 1990; Boser et al. 1992; Rizzi 1993; Guasti 1993; Clahsen et al. 1994; Friedmann et al. 2021; Heim & Wiltschko 2025). In this paper, I contribute to existing literature by exploring the explanatory potential in acquisition of a previously understudied formal notion – categorial granularity (following Biberauer & Roberts 2015; Song 2019; Biberauer 2019). I study the development of the left periphery with a multilingual corpus study on 10 children, across 5 languages. First, a novel contrast is observed: on the one hand, CP-structures emerge very early, favouring accounts with early development of CP. On the other hand, however, there is virtually no evidence in the production data to assume children are operating with a split, cartographic-type CP until a later stage. Second, I show that acquisition and structural height can mismatch: some structurally very high elements (topics, illocutionary complementisers) emerge very early in several children. I then argue that these empirical generalisations pose important challenges for several extant theories of syntactic development, especially those assuming (fully) innate categories. This is because contemporary maturational and continuity approaches posit universal categorial sequences of fixed (often cartographic) granularity. Some of them additionally predict a strong correlation between height in a cartographic tree and timing of acquisition (e.g., Friedmann et al. 2021). I interpret the preliminary results reported here to stress the analytical strengths of incorporating changes in granularity when modelling syntactic development. The data presented provides an initial impetus for a role of granularity in syntactic development and for a reconceptualisation of the latter in terms of emergent categories. I develop a neo-emergentist account of the patterns, probing Biberauer & Roberts’s (2015) emergent categorial hierarchy. I maintain that this is a productive way forward, and finish by considering how this neo-emergentist thinking could be extended in future work.

This paper analyses the emergence of illocutionary complementisers (in the sense of Corr 2016, 2022) through a corpus study with Catalan and Spanish children. The production of illocutionary complementisers by ten Catalan- and Spanish-speaking children in the CHILDES database is quantified and compared to the production of finite embedding complementisers. The results indicate that illocutionary complementisers emerge early in the child production data, often well before embedding complementisers first appear. These preliminary findings, which illustrate important developmental differences between kinds of complementisers, are hard to account for in approaches that take functional categories to mature bottom-up, with left-peripheral knowledge developing last. I argue, instead, that the early emergence of illocutionary complementisers favours a view which takes the C-domain to be present early on in child grammars. I finish by considering the development of Italo-Romance complementisers as a future direction, suggesting that a deeper analysis of child ‘errors’ or input-divergent utterances may provide significant insights into the theoretical questions presented, as much as grammatical ones.

This paper introduces a previously undescribed phenomenon in Catalan and Spanish, in which several proper nouns and person-referring DPs appear to have grammaticalised into negative indefinites that serve expressive functions (termed here Expressive Pseudo (Negative) Indefinites, or EPIs). I focus primarily on Rita (la Cantaora), the proper noun which most prototypically allows for these readings. I summarise Rita’s syntactic distribution and compare it to that of Negative Concord Items (NCIs), Polarity Items (PIs) and other expressive elements, such as English squatitives (Horn 2001). I show that Rita, like other EPIs, patterns as a syntactic class of its own, sharing only some of the traits of NCIs, PIs and squatitives. I conclude EPIs’ sui generis, yet systematic, distribution merits further scrutiny. These patterns have some implications for the typology and diachrony of negative indefinites and underscore the productive role of proper nouns in the encoding of expressivity in these languages.

This paper analyses the emergence of illocutionary complementisers (in the sense of Corr 2016) through a corpus study with Catalan and Spanish children. The production of illocutionary complementisers by ten Catalan- and Spanish-speaking children in the CHILDES database is quantified and compared to the production of finite embedding complementisers. The results indicate that illocutionary complementisers emerge early in the child production data, often well before embedding complementisers first appear. These preliminary findings, which illustrate important developmental differences between kinds of complementisers, are hard to account for in approaches that take functional categories to mature bottom-up, with left-peripheral knowledge developing last. I argue, instead, that the early emergence of illocutionary complementisers favours a view which takes the C-domain to be present early on in child grammars.

Any theory of language acquisition logically calls for a theory of the development and the epistemological foundations of individual grammars, yet the exact manner with which grammars emerge has been perennially debated (see Bavin 2009 for a review). Against this background, this work advocates for the potential of a Dynamical Systems take on grammar construction and generative grammar. I assume here Chomsky’s (2005) Three Factors approach, as well as neo-emergentist approaches to language variation, which put forward a radically impoverished Universal Grammar (Biberauer’s 2011, et seq., Maximise Minimal Means model; cf. also Ramchand & Svenonius 2014, Wiltschko 2014, Wiltschko 2021). Taking as a point of departure a maximally poor set of starting conditions (Universal Grammar) and the assumption that there exists a third-factor principle that aims to maximise minimal means, I then show how Dynamical Systems Theory (DST) naturally complements these perspectives on learnability and offer one possible theoretical implementation of DST in this context. The suggested architecture attempts to relate acquisition, cognition and representation explicitly: symbolic dynamics and contextual emergence analyses of DST allow us to interrelate, both metaphorically and topologically, (i) acquisitional dynamics, (ii) conceptual spaces (à la Gärdenfors 2000, 2014) and (iii) the representational system being derived from these interactions. The acquisitional and theoretical consequences of the proposal are also discussed.