Dr Helen Sims-Williams
About
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
My qualifications
ResearchResearch 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
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.
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.