In my previous life as a historical linguist, I wrote a paper on Latin rhotacism, which was published in the Transactions of the Philological Society. The historical development of rhotacism seems to me to be a textbook (hint hint, Ricardo) example of the life cycle of a phonological generalisation: the domain it applies to progressively shrinks through the history of Latin.
But there's no need to summarise: the news I'm here to report is that anyone who wants to can read the whole paper. If you or your library has a subscription to the journal, it's still best to download it from the Wiley Online Library, since that's the definitive version, and has the same page numbers and formatting and everything as the paper copy. However, now that we're one year after publication, I'm also allowed to make a pre-press manuscript copy available, and indeed I have done so: you can find it on LingBuzz and the Rutgers Optimality Archive, as well as the Oxford Research Archive.