Filipovic and Hawkins Publish with Philological Society

Drs. Luna Filipovic and John Hawkins have just published a new joint paper in the Journal Transactions of the Philological Society, an international journal for the structure, history, and relationships of language. They publish synchronic and diachronic studies of the widest possible range of languages and language families from the perspective of any of the subdisciplines of descriptive and theoretical linguistics. It is the oldest journal in the world having continuous publications in general linguistics. 

The work published by Filipovic and Hawkins is the latest in a series of papers they have been working on linking bilingualism to issues in language change and historical linguistics. The article is titled "The 'Bilingual Factor' in Language Change: The Consequences of Language Contact Within and Across Bilingual Minds". The journal is open access, so we encourage everyone to take a look! The abstract is below: 

Building on Uriel Weinreich’s pioneering (1953) Languages in Contact and on Peter
Matthews’ insightful commentary on it (2006, this volume) this paper discusses the
crucial role of bilingualism, and specifically different types of bilingualism, in
understanding whether and how the initial changes at the level of Saussure’s parole
can eventually become changes in grammatical conventions, Saussure’s langue, in one or
the other language in contact. It presents important insights of both a sociolinguistic
and a psycholinguistic nature that have emerged from recent studies of bilingualism, as
captured in the integrative model of bilingualism Complex Adaptive System Principles
(CASP) proposed by Filipovic & Hawkins (2019). It argues that different types of
bilingualism so defined have different consequences for language change among
different pairs of languages under different conditions of use. This application of CASP
to language change in historical linguistics extends and elaborates on numerous earlier
case studies and accounts for them from a multifactor perspective. The present paper
also highlights the important point (often neglected) that changes arising from contact
and bilingualism will be further constrained by grammatical and universal principles on
the one hand, and by diachronic processes on the other involving gradualness in change
and ease of innovation.