Of course, Plotkin wasn’t the first researcher to tackle the mechanisms of linguistic drift.
Of course, Plotkin wasn’t the first researcher to tackle the mechanisms of linguistic drift. Researchers William Hamilton, Jure Leskovec and Dan Jurafsky published a study that examined some of the major tendencies of semantic change. They pointed out that nouns are more likely to change due to irregular cultural shifts (like new technology) while verbs more often change due to regular semantic drift, largely because they are more semantically mutable than nouns.