John Whitman | National Institute of Japanese Language and Linguistics, Tokyo | Cornell University, USA
This paper argues that syntactic misparsing is not a significant factor in syntactic change, contrary to many earlier claims. It examines the best known examples in the literature of syntactic change resulting from alleged misparsing, and shows that the misparsing analysis is rejected in the most current research, or at best subject to alternative explanations. Cases discussed include SVO word order in Niger-Congo, the Chinese bǎ construction, and English for NP to VP infinitives. The paper concludes with a brief comparison of the roles of misparsing, broadly construed, in syntactic and phonological change.
2023. The Development of the Copular Participial Periphrases in Ancient Greek: Evidence for Syntactic Change and Reconstruction. In Internal and External Causes of Language Change, ► pp. 119 ff.
2018. Inferencing, Reanalysis, and the History of the French est-ce que Question. Open Linguistics 4:1 ► pp. 56 ff.
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