Willamette River
Linguistics
Profile picture of Nathaniel Sims

Nathaniel Sims

Assistant Professor
Linguistics
nasims@uoregon.edu
Office: 371 Straub Hall
Office Hours: Tue 8:00am-10:00am
Research Interests: language documentation and revitalization, historical linguistics, Trans-Himalayan languages

Education

Ph.D. 2021, University of California, Santa Barbara

M.A. 2017, University of California, Santa Barbara

B.A. 2014, Indiana University, Bloomington

 

Statement

Assistant Professor at the University of Oregon since 2023. Dr. Sims' research is focused on languages of the greater Himalayan region, especially those spoken in Sichuan, China. Since 2006, he has studied with and worked with native speakers of Rma (also called Qiang), a minoritized language of the eastern Himalayan region. He has conducted collaborative work on language documentation, archival, and revitalization. His interests are broadly phonology, morphology, and historical linguistics. He is especially interested in how the description and analysis of understudied languages contribute to linguistic typology and also methodological issues in historical-comparative linguistics.

 

Publications

In press. Tonoexodus in Rma. Diachronica.

In press. Methodological issues in Rma etymology. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies

2024b Methodological issues in Rma etymology. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. First View pp. 1-18.

2024a Nathaniel A. Sims, Bai Jianqiong, Ludwig Adisiswoyo. Voice onset time in Rma. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 46(2), 17-31.

2023b Vowel harmony in Rma: a diachronic account. Folia Linguistica Historica 44(1), 245-280.

2023a A linguistic analysis of Hodgson’s ‘Tho-chu’Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale 52(1), 51-99

2022c Tone and vowel uvularity in Rma. Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale 51(2), 209–222.

2022b ‘You and me against the world’: Direct-inverse morphology in North-western Rma. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 85(1). 99-110.

2022a Carol Genetti, Kristine Hildebrandt, Nathaniel A. Sims, Alexia Z. Fawcett. Direction and associated motion in Tibeto-Burman. Linguistic Typology 25(2). 345-388.

2021b Tonogenesis in Northeastern Trans-Himalayan. Transactions of the Philological Society 119(3). 281-288.

2021a Johann-Mattis List, Nathaniel A. Sims, & Robert Forkel. Towards a sustainable handling of inter-linear-glossed text in language documentation. Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing 20(2). 1-15.

2020 Reconsidering the diachrony of tone in Rma. Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society 13(1). 53-80.

2017 Nathaniel A. Sims & Carol Genetti. The grammatical encoding of space in Yonghe Qiang. Himalayan Linguistics 16(1). 99-140.

2016. Towards a More Comprehensive Understanding of Qiang Dialectology. Language and Linguistics 17(3). 351-381.

2014 A Phonology and Lexicon of the Yonghe Variety of Qiang. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 37(1). 34–74.