📢Now out in Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory🔓
"Reliable identification of selection mechanisms in language change"
doi.org/10.1515/cllt...
/Juan Guerrero Montero, myself, Kenny Smith, @dralgernon.bsky.social
The method is general, applicable to also cultural, social etc data! A quick diagonal version of the paper: it proposes a better method to test if a change (in a lang or cultural dataset) happened bc of some selective pressure or just drift. Example cases include the COHA verbs (that Newberry, and @folgertk.bsky.social et al also used) & Spanish spelling reforms 
