> "There is a vast literature and a lot of mythology on verb regularization and irregularization," Clark said, "and a lot of people have claimed that the tendency is toward regularization. But what we found was quite different."

Indeed, the analysis pointed to particular instances where it seems selective forces are driving irregularization. For example, while a swimmer 200 years ago might have "dived," today we would say they "dove." The shift towards using this irregular form coincided with the invention of cars and concomitant increase in use of the rhyming irregular verb "drive"/"drove."

> The authors also observed a role of random chance in grammatical change. The periphrastic "do," as used in, "Do they say?" or "They do not say," did not exist 800 years ago. Back in the 1400s, these sentiments would have been expressed as, "Say they?" or "They say not."

Using the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English, which includes 7 million syntactically parsed words from 1,220 British English texts, the researchers found that the use of the periphrastic "do" emerged in two stages, first in questions ("Don't they say?") around the 1500s, and then roughly 200 years later in imperati…