Dr Helen Sims-Williams

Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Surrey Morphology Group

BA (UCL), MPhil, DPhil (Oxford)

j.sims-williams@surrey.ac.uk

42 AC 05

Academic and research departments

School of Literature and Languages.

About
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Biography

I am currently working on the AHRC funded project 'Loss of Inflection' as a postdoctoral researcher in the Surrey Morphology Group (SMG). This project aims to understand the pathways and processes involved in the loss and reduction of inflectional systems. Before joining Surrey in 2016, I completed my PhD at the University of Oxford.

Areas of specialism

Morphology; Historical linguistics; Greek; Computational linguistics

My qualifications

2016

DPhil in Linguistics

University of Oxford

2010

MPhil in Linguistics

University of Oxford

2008

BA (Hons) in Classics

University College London

Research

Research interests

My research spans a range of topics in linguistics, with a focus on the relationship between language change and language structure. I use data from language change as a source of evidence for questions about the mechanisms underlying change and how language is structured in the mind, incorporating quantitative and computational tools of analysis.

My chief research interests lie in:

Historical linguistics
Morphology
Typology
Computational modelling of language
The Greek language
Languages of the Ancient Near East

Since 2016, I have worked as a postdoctoral research fellow on the AHRC project ‘loss of inflection’, with Matthew Baerman, Oliver Bond and Greville Corbett. This project aims to understand the pathways and processes involved in the loss and reduction of inflectional systems, and what they reveal about the internal structure of morphology.

Before joining the Surrey Morphology Group, I completed my PhD, ‘Analogy in Morphological Change’, at the University of Oxford. For my doctoral research I created a database of morphological changes in the historical development of Greek, to test theoretical claims that morphological change is directed towards the optimisation of grammar. Using this data, I showed how frequency influences morphological change, and argued that this can be understood as a byproduct of the way speakers predict unknown forms in inflectional systems.

Research projects

Loss of Inflection

Over the last 1200 years English has lost nearly all of its complex inflectional system, radically transforming its character, and similar developments have occurred in the histories of language all across the world. At first glance this looks simply like decay, and this is often how it figures in the public imagination. But the loss of inflection is a complex and multidimensional process. The processes involved in the loss of inflectional loss are a potential source of insight into the workings of grammar, seen from a unique perspective.

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.

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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.

Sims-Williams, Helen & Enger, Hans-Olav (2019). 'The Loss of Inflection as Grammar Complication: Evidence from Mainland Scandinavian varieties' (in preparation)

Baerman, Matthew, Bond, Oliver, & Sims-Williams, Helen (2019). 'Language contact and linguistic typology'. To appear in Hickey, R. (ed.), The Handbook of Language Contact, 2nd edition. Wiley-Blackwell.

Baerman, Matthew & Sims-Williams, Helen (2019). 'The External Typology of the Loss of Inflection'. To appear In Breban, Tine and Kranich, Svenja (eds), Lost in Change: Causes and processes in the loss of grammatical constructions and categories. John Benjamins.

Sims-Williams, Helen (2019). 'Token Frequency as a Determinant of Morphological Change' (under review)

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