About Me

I am fascinated by morphological systems and investigate them from synchronic, diachronic, and typological perspective.

When morphology develops out of phonology or syntax, a frequent hallmark of this change is the splintering of a single, broad generalization into a series of more fragmentary and morpholexically-specific generalizations. The resulting 'idiosyncracies', far from being exceptions, have the potential to tell us how lexical distributions shape the emergence, evolution, reinforcement, and generalization of morphological structures. (This makes me an inveterate fox in Isaiah Berlin's fox-hedgehog continuum.) I use a variety of methods to explore these issues, including quantitative methods, graph-theoretic modeling, computational modeling (in collaboration with colleagues), and classic linguistic description. Reflecting a 'morphocentric' perspective, I tend to engage with aspects of morphological structure that cannot be reduced to phonology or syntax. 

I have worked on inflection class structure (e.g. using information theory and graph theory); inflectional defectiveness (paradigmatic gaps), syncretism, and other form-meaning mismatches; the morphological structure of the lexicon; derivational affix combinability restrictions; and cross-linguistic differences in morphological organization. I work on a variety of languages but have a particular interest in South Slavic/Balkan languages -- especially Croatian (Serbian, Bosnian, Montenegrin) -- as well as Russian and Greek. 

With the help of some awesome collaborators, I am currently working to incorporate information about sign languages' morphology into the next edition of my textbook, Understanding Morphology.

I was honored to be inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2025.

CV

Resources and Links

• Papers can be downloaded from my researchgate.net page.
• Datasets and Code
  • NašLex: A Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian inflectional lexicon, v. 1.0.0 (Sims and Copot 2026) (dataset)
  • Zalilex: Russian nominal paradigms lexicon, v. 1.0.0 (Beniamine, Brown, Guzmán Naranjo and Sims 2025) (dataset)
  • Inflectional networks: Resources for graph-theoretic analysis of linguistic morphology, v. 1.0.1 (Sims 2019) (R code)
  • Code and data for some of my individual papers are available on OSF
• Accessible Presentations Using LaTeX: I recently taught myself how to make presentations in LaTeX that are accessible for use with screen readers (for blind and low vision users). I created a slide deck of notes about how to do this that is itself also an example of a presentation that passes accessibility checks. The first link below is the slide deck (pdf). The second (zip) is to the LaTeX source code for the slide deck.
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    source395.77 KB
• In June 2021 I was featured on the Arts and Sciences' Voices of Excellence podcast, available on Soundcloud and iTunes.

Current Ph.D. Advisees

• Martha Booker Johnson
• Connor Rouillier
• Spencer Poggemann

Other Campus Affiliations

• Buckeye Language Network
• Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences
• Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies
• Computational Social Sciences Community of Practice

Other Roles

• Co-Editor of Word Structure (Edinburgh University Press)
• Member-at-Large, Section Z (Linguistics and Language Sciences) Steering Committee, American Association for the Advancement of Science