Jack Hawkins: Historical, Typological, and Applied Linguistics

Jack (John) Hawkins has three research projects currently ongoing or near completion. Read about it now!

(1) A project on historical linguistics with Luna Filipović entitled "Contact-induced language change and its constraints in relation to actuation", investigates the role of contact and multilingualism in bringing about language change. The abstract follows:

"The central problem for language change that has been formulated as the “actuation problem” (Weinreich et al. 1968) involves explaining why changes happen when they do and in the languages they do, but not at other times or in other typologically similar languages. One factor that has emerged as a “cause for hope” in solving the problem has been language contact: a particular change takes place in a given language at the time it does because this language is in contact with another language from which the property in question has been borrowed. In this paper we argue that this cause for hope needs to be considerably refined if it is to be helpful in relation to the actuation problem. The crucial refinement we need is to talk about bilingualism, and specifically different types of bilingualism sociolinguistically and psycholinguistically and with different pairs of languages, in order to better understand whether there will be any influence from one on the other. Even if the type of bilingualism and its distribution throughout a speech community at a given time does lend itself to borrowing, the actuation of any change will be further constrained by general grammatical and universal principles on the one hand, and by diachronic processes on the other involving gradualness and ease of innovation. This paper builds on the general model of bilingualism, CASP (short for “complex adaptive system principles”) developed in Filipović (2019) and Filipović & Hawkins (2019), and applies it to language change and the actuation problem. By shifting the emphasis from contact to bilingualism we gain greater clarity on when contact does lead to change. Conversely, when changes are observed, we gain greater clarity on whether these changes were the result of contact."

(2) A paper that is more typological and semantic in nature involves a detailed examination of relative clauses in two Germanic languages, English and German, that occupy opposite poles in a typological continuum that I have described previously in terms of "tight" versus "loose" form-meaning mappings. The paper compares actual usage in parallel texts in these languages and shows that even when both languages share numerous construction types, the tight versus loose typology in terms of structural selection still holds. The abstract follows:

"This study compares postnominal finite relative clauses and their translation equivalents in a parallel corpus of German and English. Of particular interest are cases where one language, generally English, used a syntactically and semantically reduced nominal modifier instead of the finite relative. Such contrasts in language use are linked to contrasts in their grammars whereby German has been described as having a “tighter fit” in general between forms and their corresponding semantic representations and English a “looser fit”. This same typology is now seen as operating in actual usage as well, even though both languages share the same finite structure plus numerous reduced modifiers. The data presented here illustrate how the tight fit/loose fit typology can be extended into quantitative predictions for testing on cross-language corpora and they support a hypothesized correspondence between grammatical variation and performance variation.^"

(3) Another project is of a more applied nature and is entitled "The English Language on Trial: Witnessing Disputed Meanings in American Courts." The abstract follows:

"Many lawsuits arise over disagreements about language and about the meanings of everyday words, phrases and sentences. The present book draws on over 50 cases involving disputed meanings in the American legal system where the author served as an expert witness or consultant. The cases involved contracts, patents, advertising, trademarks, libel, and defamation. The book steps back from the legal specifics and their outcomes and analyzes the disputes from the perspective of the language sciences, especially semantics and pragmatics and language comprehension. It seeks to understand why and in what areas of English grammar, lexis, and usage they have arisen among speakers who do not normally miscommunicate and disagree like this. Descriptive insights and methods from the language sciences are applied to each case to make explicit and conscious the meanings that speakers would normally assign to English, were it not "on trial." The language sciences can accordingly assist the triers of fact to reach the right legal judgments in these disputes."