We are interested in all aspects of morphological systems: synchronic, diachronic, and typological. Much of the group’s research involves Slavic languages, but our curiosity is not limited to these languages. We are particularly interested in how lexical distributions shape morphological structure over time, and those aspects of morphological structure that cannot be reduced to phonology or syntax.

We employ a wide range of methods, including quantitative corpus methods, computational modeling, informant elicitation and classic grammatical description.

The group contains both undergraduate and graduate members. We welcome new members with relevant research interests. The group is directed by Prof. Andrea Sims, who is jointly appointed in Linguistics and Slavic.

Recent Publications

LeFevre, Grace, Micha Elsner, and Andrea D. Sims. 2021. Formalizing inflectional paradigm shape with information theory. Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 4: Article 11, pp. 102-115. [download]

Parker, Jeff and Andrea D. Sims. 2020. Irregularity, paradigmatic layers, and the complexity of inflection class systems: A study of Russian nouns. In The complexities of morphology, edited by Peter Arkadiev and Francesco Gardani, 23-51. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [download]

Sims, Andrea D. 2020. Inflectional networks: Graph-theoretic tools for inflectional typology. Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 3: Article 10, 88-98. [download]

King, David, Andrea D. Sims, and Micha Elsner. 2020. Interpreting sequence-to-sequence models for Russian inflectional morphology. Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 3: Article 39, 402-411. [download]

Elsner, Micha, Martha Booker Johnson, Stephanie Antetomaso, and Andrea D. Sims. 2020. Stop the morphological cycle, I want to get off: Modeling the development of fusion. Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 3: Article 40, 412-422. [download]

Elsner, Micha, Andrea D. Sims, Alexander Erdmann, Antonio Hernandez, Evan Jaffe, Lifeng Jin, Martha Booker Johnson, Shuan Karim, David L. King, Luana Lamberti Nunes, Byung-Doh Oh, Nathan Rasmussen, Cory Shain, Stephanie Antetomaso, Kendra Dickinson, Noah Diewald, Michelle McKenzie, and Symon Stevens-Guille. 2019. Modeling morphological learning, typology, and change: What can the neural sequence-to-sequence framework contribute? Journal of Language Modelling 7(1): 125-170. [download]

Davidson, Kathryn, Annemarie Kocab, Andrea D. Sims and Laura Wagner. 2019. The relationship between verbal form and event structure in sign languages. Glossa 4(1): Article 123, 1-36. DOI: 10.5334/gjgl.924 [download]

Sims, Andrea D. 2019. When the default is exceptional: Word stress in Modern Greek nouns. In And thus you are everywhere honored: Studies dedicated to Brian D. Joseph, edited by James J. Pennington, Victor A. Friedman, and Lenore Grenoble. Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 325-351. [download]

Sims, Andrea D. and Brian D. Joseph. 2018. Morphology versus syntax in the Balkan verbal complex. In Balkan syntax and (universal) principles of grammar, edited by Iliyana Krapova and Brian D. Joseph. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 99-150. [download]

Sims, Andrea D. 2017. Slavic morphology: Recent approaches to classic problems, illustrated with Russian. Journal of Slavic Linguistics 25(2): 491-526. [download]

Sims, Andrea D. and Jeff Parker. 2016. How inflection class systems work: On the informativity of implicative structure. Word Structure 9(2): 215-239. [download]

Sims, Andrea D. 2015. Morphosyntactic agreement in Croatian (Wikipedia): Thoughts on the space between ‘errors’ and ‘conventionalized grammar’. Balkanistica 28: 519-546. [download]

Sims, Andrea D. and Jeff Parker. 2015. Lexical processing and affix ordering: Cross-linguistic predictions. Morphology 25(2): 143-182. [download]

Parker, Jeff. 2015. Solving Russian velars: Palatalization, the lexicon and gradient contrast utilization. Slavic and East European Journal 59 (1): 70-90. [download]

Sims, Andrea D. 2015. Inflectional defectiveness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [download table of contents]