Andrea.Sims's picture

Andrea Sims

The Ohio State University

Short Bio: 
I am Associate Professor at The Ohio State University (Columbus, Ohio, USA). A specialist in morphological theory and Slavic languages, I am excited by word structure because it exhibits a high degree of idiosyncrasy. 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. In addition to being evidence for "morphology by itself", I see this idiosyncrasy as the best possibility for understanding how morphological structure emerges, evolves, is reinforced, and is generalized (or fails to be). In addition to authoring papers in journals such as Word Structure and Morphology, I am the author of a research monograph, Inflectional Defectiveness (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and co-author of a widely used textbook, Understanding Morphology (Routledge 2010, with M. Haspelmath). At Ohio State I teach classes on morphological theory; the grammatical structures of Russian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, and Balkan languages; and the sociology and politics of language in the Balkans. Along with collaborators, I am organizing an NSF-funded workshop, Morphological Typology and Linguistic Cognition, to be held in conjunction with the 2017 Institute.
Research interests: 
morphology (formal synchronic theory/typology/change)
structure of the lexicon
emergent structure and complex adaptive systems
quantitative corpus-based methods
elicitation methods
inflection class organization
inflectional defectiveness
derivational affix ordering