CatCaD focuses on the linguistic units typically called ‘nouns’ and ‘verbs’. We ask whether nouns and verbs can be decomposed into smaller grammatical primitives and we approach this question from the point of view of nominal and verbal morphology. Against the backdrop of existing typological and formal research on the crosslinguistic manifestation and acquisition of nouns and verbs, we undertake a detailed, in‐depth investigation of Afrikaans and Dutch, closely related languages—thus allowing for fine‐grained comparison—while at the same time varying considerably in their morphology and lexicon, their language contact situation, and the level of bi/multilingualism of their speakers. The project has two work packages that focus on verbal and nominal morphology respectively, and one that brings together the insights from those two and builds towards an overarching theory of nominal and verbal categorization. The CatCAD team consists of Jeroen van Craenenbroeck, Theresa Biberauer (Cambridge/Stellenbosch), Cora Cavirani‐Pots (Cambridge), Fien Croux, and one still to be hired postdoctoral researcher.
