Surface patterns or syntactic structure?

What is it about?

It is generally assumed that syntactic change is restricted or even determined by linguistic structure or rather the knowledge of speakers thereof. In this paper it is shown that Ancient Greek offers examples of syntactic change which are based on surface patterns alone, ignoring or even suspending structural demands. This observation is crucial for our understanding of mental representations of language as it shows that speakers have access to and generalize from surface patterns.

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