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Structural ambiguity is attributed a central role as a driving force in diachronic change. However, what is referred to as structural ambiguity in theories of language change does not necessarily imply structurally ambiguous sentences with two interpretations. It refers to the principled possibility of attributing two different structural analyses to a sentence. Generative approaches assume that in first language acquisition, the learner may chose the innovative analysis and reanalyze the input in terms of a new parametric choice if p-ambiguous sentences provide a more economic option which occurs more frequently than a competing older setting in the input. We argue that structural ambiguity alone is unlikely to suffice as a cause for reanalysis because even a minimal amount of unambiguous evidence enables children to develop the grammar of the preceding generation. In addition, it is questionable that structural economy (of representation) is indeed psycholinguistically relevant in language acquisition. With respect to word order change from Old to contemporary French, we argued against the view that superficial word order patterns can at all be triggers of parametric choices.

This chapter highlights the effect of processing difficulty on acceptability. It analyses evidence demonstrating that parsing problems often reduce acceptability. It shows that the fact that processing difficulty may increase acceptability is less obvious, but this probability is nonetheless borne out. The preferred interpretation of a locally vague construction can have a positive influence on the global acceptability of a sentence even when this is later abandoned. The occurrence of the positive impact of local ambiguities in a domain that goes beyond mere syntactic feature differences is confirmed by the experiments focusing on long wh-movement. Thus, local acceptability perceptions during the parsing process influence the global acceptability of a sentence.

This chapter first describes what has been learned about how readers process sentences, using information from individual words in combination with linguistic knowledge to generate larger units of meaning corresponding to phrases and sentences. The chapter then reviews what has been learned about sentence processing using various methods, but most notably, the measurement of readers’ eye movements. The chapter then reviews precursor theories and models of sentence processing—models that provide early attempts to explain how readers construct the meanings of phrases and sentences, and that motivate much of the subsequent research to understand the relative contributions of syntactic versus semantic information in sentence processing. The chapter then reviews a large, representative sample of the models that have been used to simulate and understand various facets of sentence processing. These are presented in their order of development to show how the models have evolved to accommodate new empirical findings. The chapter concludes with an explicit comparative analysis of the sentence-processing models and discussion of the empirical findings that each model can and cannot explain.

Grammatical change has been claimed to happen in the course of transmission of grammatical knowledge from one generation to the next. The locus of change is thus the language learning child, and change is the result of grammatical reanalysis, i.e. when children fail to reconstruct the grammar of the previous generation in at least one point. Yet this should never affect core properties of grammars (paradox of grammatical change), for both the primary linguistic data (PLD) and the acquisition mechanisms are hypothesized to be constrained by UG. In fact, children acquiring a first languages (L1) typically attain full competence, thus attesting the robustness of the LAD. The question then is whether there exist conditions under which the LAD might fail. It has been argued that decreasing frequency of occurrence of a grammatical property, structural ambiguity of a construction, or the presence of more than one grammatical system in the linguistic environment of the learner (language contact) are possible causes of transmission failure. In this chapter, it is argued that neither of them is a sufficient cause of transmission failure in L1 development. Rather, change is only likely to happen if the triggering cues are contained in the PLD; cf. chapters 5, 6.

Starting from the observation that Latin word order is remarkably flexible, this chapter presents and compares four different approaches (non-configurational, semi-configurational, hybrid, and fully configurational) to Latin clausal syntax. It is pointed out that only fully configurational approaches can accommodate so-called higher-order constituents, like verb phrases. Next, the concept of structural ambiguity is introduced, and it is shown how the four systems mentioned make different predictions with respect to the availability of this phenomenon, and how one obtains very different descriptive results in a study on Latin word order if structural ambiguity is controlled for or it is not. The last part of the chapter provides a number of arguments that Latin has a VP constituent, and therefore that a configurational approach is on the right track. The conclusion is that in a study on Latin word order it is indeed necessary to systematically control for structural ambiguity.

This chapter addresses the question of which syntactic environment constitutes the most reliable source of information on variable object placement in Latin. The relevance of this question is illustrated by showing that very different results are obtained when one compares the rate of VO in two different syntactic contexts, namely clauses with a single synthetic verb and clauses with a modal verb and a dependent infinitive. It is argued that the OV/VO alternation is best studied to clauses with more than one verb, as in such clauses, more object positions can be unambiguously identified. The final part of the chapter is devoted to the phrase structure analysis of clauses with the modals possum ‘be able’ and debeo ‘have to’. These structures are argued to constitute monoclausal domains, in which the modals are raising predicates that originate in functional heads in the extended projection of lexical verbs.

In arguing that to have a visual experience with character c is to have a visual experience that is occurring in way w the author has assumed that there is a reading of ‘The patch looks grey to you’ on which we mean that you have a visual experience with character c. There is a concern that there may be no such reading. This concern is explained and addressed in this chapter by appealing to the distinction between opaque and transparent readings, and by appealing to a structural ambiguity in our use of ‘to you’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’.