Joe Jackson (language evolution researcher) 2026-11-05
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Joe Jackson coauthored the 2007 quantitative study of English irregular-verb regularization. Its byline identifies the author with Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics.[ref]
The authors tracked a historical cohort of irregular verbs and related survival of irregular forms to word frequency. This illustrates survival analysis applied to cultural transmission: the object being lost is a linguistic form. The estimated regularization rate describes an aggregate pattern, without implying that all low-frequency verbs change together.[ref]
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