research 👩💻
Acquisition of Expletive Subjects in West Germanic
With Theresa Biberauer
This work looks at the development of expletive types (esp. weather vs. existential) in German, English and Dutch children. We show that children selectively drop expletive subjects, with omission targeting weather (but not existential) expletives. We offer a novel perspective on subject drop, by integrating the notion of categorial differentiation to derive the order of acquisition of subject distinctions.
Acquisition of Negative Concord in Catalan and Spanish
In collaboration with NegLaB project C06 (PIs Esther Rinke and Petra Schulz)
As part of a short-term research fellowship with NegLaB, I worked on the first study of the acquisition of Negative Concord in Catalan and Spanish, which I then compared to the development of West Germanic Negative Quantifiers. I propose that the Catalan and Spanish data provides novel evidence against the idea that Negative Concord is acquisitionally more ‘default’ than a Double Negation system.
📝 Ongoing. Please email me if interested in slides/manuscripts.
Expressive negation in Catalan proper nouns
I report a restricted set of proper nouns in Catalan and Spanish that can receive interpretations that resemble negative indefinites. Specifically, I use a large-scale grammaticality judgement survey to show one such proper noun (Rita) is at an advanced stage of grammaticalisation in a subset of speakers, partly behaving like Negative Concord Items in its syntactic distribution.
📝 DiGS 26 (slides); RoLinC invited talk (slides); CRISPI paper (preprint)
Induction of morphophonological alternations in Artificial Language Learning
With Bert Vaux
Using artificial languages, we designed an initial experiment to probe an under-explored (potential) bias – a scope expansion bias favoring generalization of rules to as many segments as possible in their structural environment, independently of the complexity of the resulting rule. Our results argued against conservative learners and in favor of simplicity-driven biases, such as the Tolerance Principle.
📝 AMP 2024 proceedings (paper).
Mathematically and cognitively-inspired approaches to syntactic development
I dabbled in dynamical systems theory and category theory during my BA and MPhil. I explored how mathematical frameworks such as dynamical systems theory and category theory can contribute more cognitively grounded models of syntactic development. As a proof of concept, I proposed a synthesis between neo-emergentist generative approaches and the category-theoretic model of Evolutive Systems (Ehresmann & Vanbremeersch).