Dr Helen Sims-Williams
Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Surrey Morphology Group
BA (UCL), MPhil, DPhil (Oxford)
Academic and research departments
Biography
I am currently working on the AHRC funded project 'Loss of Inflection' as a postdoctoral researcher.
Research
Research interests
My main research interests lie in historical linguistics, morphology, and typology, particularly in the relationship between language change and language structure. I use diachronic data as a source of evidence for questions about the mechanisms of change and the mental architecture of morphology, incorporating quantitative and computational tools of analysis.
My publications
Publications
Sims-Williams, Helen
(2016).
Analogical Levelling and Optimisation: The Treatment of Pointless Lexical Allomorphy in Greek. Transactions of the Philological Society, 114(3), 315-338.
Sims-Williams, Helen
(2018).
The External Typology of the Loss of Inflection. Paper presented at the workshop "Lost in change: causes and processes in the loss of grammatical constructions and categories" (40. Jahrestagung der Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft), University of Stuttgart, Germany, 7-9 March 2018.
Sims-Williams, Helen
(2016).
Analogy in Morphological Change (PhD Thesis, University of Oxford)
Sims-Williams, Helen, Baerman, Matthew, Bond, Oliver & Corbett, Greville G.
(2017).
The Loss of Inflection. Paper presented at the workshop “Loss of Inflection”, ICHL 23, San Antonio, Texas, 31 July - 4 August 2017.
Sims-Williams, Helen
(2017).
A diachronic mechanism for form-frequency asymmetries in inflectional paradigms. Paper presented at the workshop "Sprachliche Kodierungs-Asymmetrien, Gebrauchsfrequenz und Informativität" (39. Jahrestagung der Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft), University of the Saarland, Germany, 8-10 March 2017.
Sims-Williams, Helen, Baerman, Matthew, Bond, Oliver & Corbett, Greville G.
(2017).
The loss of inflection from the perspective of areal typology. Paper presented at the workshop "Diachronic Morphology: theoretical, areal and phylogenetic perspectives", University of Zürich, Switzerland, 26-27 January 2017.
Enger, Hans-Olav & Sims-Williams, Helen
(2018).
Loss of Inflection in North Germanic Adjectives – or is it? Paper presented at the 18th International Morphology Meeting, Budapest, Hungary, 10-13 May 2018.