Joseph Roye Applegate (December 4, 1925 – October 18, 2003) was an American linguist.
Applegate received his master's and PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania, after which he began his career at MIT in the Research Laboratory of Electronics in 1955.
At the Research Laboratory of Electronics he studied the mechanical translation of languages.
At MIT he taught linguistics with such peers as Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle.
[4] He left MIT and worked at the University of California in Los Angeles from 1960 to 1966.