Núria Bosch

I am particularly interested in syntax (theoretical, comparative and diachronic) and its intersection with child language acquisition and biolinguistics. My PhD project studies the role of ‘categorial granularity’ in acquisition and language change, incorporating, primarily, novel morphosyntactic case studies and also phonological ones. Granularity, and the related ‘feature (un)bundling’, have received limited theoretical attention in these domains, despite being implicit in many analyses. Working under an approach assuming emergent categories, my research aims to better understand this potential process of ‘granularisation’ and to detect diachronic/developmental patterns therein. I plan to pursue a neo-emergentist take on granularity, granularity-affecting changes and the acquisition of functional categories; namely, one which makes minimal assumptions about the content of the innate endowment available to the language acquirer (following much work that started at Cambridge).

Ultimately, the bigger-picture aim is to show that ‘Three Factors’ approaches which reinterpret and rebalance the role of the innate component in favour of the input and the third factor (e.g., learning biases and general-cognitive principles of data analysis) provide fresh insights into a wide range of enduring questions in linguistic theory, notably those surrounding the development of native-speaker knowledge and the ontological bases of human language.

Before my PhD, I completed a BA and MPhil (by Thesis) in Linguistics from 2019 until 2023, also at Cambridge (St John’s College). I began my PhD in October 2023, co-funded by AHRC and St John’s and as an Honorary Cambridge Trust Scholar. I am supervised by Prof. Bert Vaux and Dr. Theresa Biberauer.