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Balthasar Bickel is a linguist studying the diversification of languages and the mechanisms that constrain it. His research combines comparisons of grammars, lexicons and text corpus resources with experimental methods including electroencephalography and eye tracking. He describes these as complementary approaches to language change and its biological foundations.^[ref]

The combination illustrates two different sources of evidence. Comparing documented syntactic dependencies across languages can reveal recurring patterns; an experiment can instead hold an input contrast fixed and measure processing in participants. These are examples of the questions those methods can address, rather than findings inferred from a biography.

Balthasar Bickel also co-developed the Leipzig Glossing Rules by Bernard Comrie and others with Bernard Comrie and Martin Haspelmath. Their shared conventions make linguistic annotation easier to compare while leaving grammatical analysis open to argument.^[ref]

Culturomics investigates historical patterns through large-scale quantitative analysis of recorded language, especially digitized books. A text corpus turns occurrences of words or n-grams into measurable time series. Jean-Baptiste Michel and collaborators demonstrated the approach with a corpus of 5,195,769 books, selecting material partly by the quality of optical character recognition and publication metadata.^[ref]

For an original example, 500 occurrences in ten million word tokens give $500/10^7=5\times 10^{-5}$. A later collection with 800 occurrences in twenty million tokens gives $4\times 10^{-5}$: the count rose, but the normalized rate fell. A changing name can also change the measured series without an equivalent change in its referent. Culturomics therefore connects computational counting to hypotheses about language change, while requiring checks on publication selection, transcription errors and changing terminology.

Derek Denis is a linguist studying language change and variation, particularly Canadian English. His University of Toronto Mississauga profile describes using archival oral-history recordings to investigate earlier Ontario English and studying how Toronto's multilingual communities contribute to emerging speech patterns.^[ref]

The recordings make the comparison empirical: observed pronunciations and usages can be related to speakers and historical settings rather than inferred solely from spelling. His work in sociolinguistics asks how innovations arise and spread. A listed study of Toronto vowels connects that question to measurable sound patterns. He is a coauthor of Essentials of Linguistics (2nd edition) by Catherine Anderson and others.

Language change is systematic change over time in a community's sounds, grammatical patterns or meanings. It can be investigated by comparing historical records or repeated measurements, while separating change from differences in sampling, spelling and individual style. A text corpus supplies observations rather than a complete record of every speaker.

A 2007 study by Erez Lieberman and collaborators tracked 177 verbs irregular in Old English. In their dataset, 145 remained irregular at the Middle English stage and 98 at the modern endpoint. Their statistical model related the rate of verb regularization to usage frequency, with estimated half-life proportional to the square root of frequency.^[ref]

Under that fitted scaling, a 100-fold frequency increase predicts a tenfold half-life increase. This is an empirical relationship for the studied process and data, rather than a universal law for every kind of language change. The historical endpoint must not be mistaken for a fresh count of present-day usage.

Verb regularization is a form of language change in which an exceptional verb form is replaced by one following a productive grammatical pattern. For English past forms, this can mean adopting the -ed pattern rather than retaining an inherited alternative. Historical change in a speech community is distinct from a child's occasional application of a pattern to an irregular verb.

A quantitative study by Erez Lieberman and collaborators tracked irregular verbs across historical stages and identified help among verbs that became regular.^[ref] A hypothetical series with regular forms in 12 of 40 past-tense uses at one stage and 32 of 40 at another would show the regular variant's proportion rising from $0.3$ to $0.8$. Those counts alone would not establish the cause: recording practices, speaker composition and competing variants must also be checked. Regularization describes a pattern of inflection, not a judgment that the newer form is intrinsically better.