Dr Helen Sims-Williams
About
Biography
My research investigates the relationship between language change and language structure. I use data from language change as evidence for questions about the mechanisms underlying change and how language is structured in the mind, incorporating quantitative and computational tools of analysis.
I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Surrey Morphology Group (SMG). My current project, Predicting Language Evolution (funded by the Leverhulme Trust), aims to produce statistical models of morphological change.
Before returning to Surrey I was a researcher at the Centre for Language Evolution at the University of Edinburgh, where I developed computer simulations to explore links between sociolinguistic typology and linguistic complexity, as part of the ERC project The Evolution of Linguistic Complexity.
From 2016-2019 I was a postdoctoral researcher in SMG working on the AHRC funded project Loss of Inflection.
In 2016 I completed my PhD at the University of Oxford on the subject of Analogy in Morphological Change.
Areas of specialism
My qualifications
Publications
Ancient Greek verbal morphology involved extensive allomorphy of lexical morphemes, most of which was phonologically and semantically arbitrary, lexically idiosyncratic, and functionally redundant. In the subsequent history of the language this allomorphy was reduced, partly through analogical levelling, where an allomorphic alternation is eliminated in favour of a single phonological expression of underlying meaning. This kind of reduction of arbitrary complexity is often observed in the development of morphological systems, which has inspired a common view of morphological change as being guided by universal preferences, which nudge morphological systems along paths which will lead them to a more optimal status. This paper uses some systematic empirical data from the history of Greek to put to the test two questions about analogical levelling and the role of optimisation'. Firstly, is levelling motivated by a universal preference for a one-to-one alignment of meaning and form in language? Secondly, is the direction of levelling determined by universal preferences for particular ways of marking morphosyntactic distinctions? I will argue that the answer to both questions is no: the changes in the Greek data I have examined are remarkably well predicted by language-specific, formal properties of paradigms, without the need to invoke universal preferences. These facts are best accommodated if speaker competence includes detailed probabilistic information about the predictive structure of paradigms, which has important implications for morphological theory, as well as historical linguistics.
The Loss of Inflection Database is a digital repository of examples of language change from 50 languages, each involving the loss of inflectional contrasts within paradigms.
Analogy has returned to prominence in the field of inflectional morphology as a basis for new explanations of inflectional productivity. Here we review the rising profile of analogy, identifying key theoretical and methodological developments, areas of success, and priorities for future work. In morphological theory, work within so-called abstractive approaches places analogy at the center of productive processes, though significant conceptual and technical details remain to be settled. The computational modeling of inflectional analogy has a rich and diverse history, and attention is now increasingly directed to understanding inflectional systems through their internal complexity and cross-linguistic diversity. A tension exists between the prima facie promise of analogy to lead to new explanations and its relative lack of theoretical articulation. We bring this to light as we examine questions regarding inflectional defectiveness and whether analogy is reducible to grammar optimization resulting from simplicity biases in learning and language use. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Linguistics, Volume 10 is January 2024. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
This paper demonstrates that morphological change tends to involve the replacement of low frequency forms in inflectional paradigms by innovative forms based on high frequency forms, using Greek data involving the diachronic reorganisation of verbal inflection classes. A computational procedure is outlined for generating a possibility space of morphological changes which can be represented as analogical proportions, on the basis of synchronic paradigms in ancient Greek. I then show how supplementing analogical proportions with token frequency information can help to predict whether a hypothetical change actually took place in the language's subsequent development. Because of the crucial role of inflected surface forms serving as analogical bases in this model, I argue that the results support theories in which inflected forms can be stored whole in the lexicon.
The expressive power of natural languages depends on their regular compositional structure, which allows us to express and understand an infinite set of messages. However, a complete model of language evolution should also account for irregular exceptions to regular rules, common in natural languages. Historical linguistics has established a correlation between irregularity and frequency in language use, which has been attributed to preferential irregularisation of frequent items, or preferential regularisation of infrequent items. In an iterated learning experiment where participants learn and reproduce a miniature language across multiple generations, we show that this correlation can be explained by the relationship between frequency, regularity and learnability, without needing to appeal to frequency-dependent irregularisation. We find that systems of plural marking regularise across generations of transmission, but that high-frequency items remain irregular. Our results further show that the persistence of irregularity is due to high frequency overriding pressures which normally reduce learnability, such as low generalisability of the inflectional strategy (suppletion is disfavoured except in high frequency items) and low type frequency (belonging to a small inflectional class is disfavoured except in high frequency items).
As an enterprise, linguistic typology is perhaps best understood in terms of the shared ideology of its practitioners. In studying contact‐induced change typologists can begin to understand which features of language are readily acquired or arise through contact. This chapter focuses on recent developments in research on language contact in relation to contemporary thought in linguistic typology. While typology in general is concerned with identifying sets of variables and developing probabilistic theories explaining their distribution, morphological typology relates these goals to the shape, properties, and distribution of morphological systems. The chapter examines some of the ways in an understanding of the diversity of morphological systems can help provide support for contact‐based explanations of linguistic variables. It presents a case study to show that the typological properties of a language may also be changed through contact that leads to loss, rather than augmentation or reorganization.
Additional publications
Sims-Williams, Helen (2021). Token Frequency as a Determinant of Morphological Change. Journal of Linguistics, 58(3), 571-607.
Sims-Williams, Helen and Hans-Olav Enger (2020). The Loss of Inflection as Grammar Complication. Diachronica 38(1), 111-150
Bond, Oliver, Sims-Williams, Helen, and Matthew Baerman (2020). Contact and Linguistic Typology. In Raymond Hickey (ed.), The Handbook of Language Contact (2nd Edition). Wiley-Blackwell.
Sims-Williams, Helen and Matthew Baerman (2020). A Typological Perspective on the Loss of Inflection. In Svenja Kranich and Tine Breban (eds), Lost in Change: Causes and processes in the loss of grammatical constructions and categories. John Benjamins. 21-49.
Sims-Williams, Helen, & Matthew Baerman (2019). Loss of Inflection Database. University of Surrey. https://lossofinflection.surrey.ac.uk
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 (2016). Analogy in Morphological Change. (PhD Thesis, University of Oxford).