Communication and the Dynamics of Linguistic Change

Linguistic change often originates in the reanalysis of spoken language, that is, in a change in the underlying grammatical structure or semantic interpretation assigned to a form whose surface realization initially remains unchanged. If communication is viewed as faithful message transmission between sender and receiver, how can such mismatches arise? We argue that reanalysis is possible when truth conditions are preserved across the original and reanalysed representations, allowing mismatches between surface form and underlying grammar to be treated as noise and repaired in processing. We support this hypothesis with diachronic evidence from multiple languages showing shifts ingrammatical analysis alongside stable propositional content. We then present a sentence-repetition experiment in which participants were asked to repeat sentences verbatim. We find that participants reproduce a corrected form rather than the original stimulus when truth conditions remain stable, but accurately reproduce errors when these introduce semantic ambiguity. These findings indicate that repair is driven not by formal deviance alone, but by interpretive stability, and thus illuminate how real-time processing mechanisms can give rise to long-term language change.