Dr Helen Sims-Williams

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.