research 👩‍💻

My PhD explores the explanatory potential of a previously understudied formal notion in language acquisition: categorial granularity, with particular focus on the left periphery.

I argue that children acquire a CP domain early, but that functional domains become progressively granularised during development. On this view, the acquisition of a richly articulated CP in the Rizzian cartographic tradition is a later development. Drawing on crosslinguistic empirical data, I argue that this developmental trajectory supports a growing theoretical literature proposing crosslinguistically variable (emergent) elaboration of functional domains.

I develop this proposal through a series of cumulative case studies on the CP and A’-dependencies. So far, I have looked into monolingual and bilingual children acquiring: Catalan, Spanish, Italian, German, English, Dutch, and, more recently, French. I have also worked on the acquisition of topicalisation strategies in a crosslinguistic sample of ten languages. Another strand of my PhD work analyses the overgeneralisation of Embedded V2 orders in German–Italian bilinguals.

📝 For output, see my publications and presentations pages. A summary of an early version of this project can be found in my Glossa paper.

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.

📝 BUCLD 50 (slides); NELS 56 (slides).

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.

📝 Lingbuzz paper.

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)

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).

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).

📝 MPhil thesis (thesis); BA thesis (paper).