On April 20, 2023, Johanna Benz, advised by Dave Embick, successfully defended her PhD proposal, entitled "Structure and interpretation across categories” (abstract below). His proposal committee included Rolf Noyer and Florian Schwarz and was chaired by Martin Salzmann.
Abstract: Derivational morphology is intricately related to its syntactic context, interpretation, and exponence. For this reason, it can seem like a particularly fuzzy domain of investigation: revealing systematicity in the connections of these parts of the grammar requires pinning down what meanings are contributed or shifted by derivational morphemes, how different exponents of categorizing heads are related to each other, and how syntactic properties are affected when words change category. In the proposed dissertation, I take up this task with an empirical focus on three phenomena in German derivational morphology: prefixation in verbs and nouns, nominalization, and restrictions on multiple affixation.