People sometimes interpret implausible sentences non-literally, for example treating The mother gave the candle the daughter as meaning the daughter receiving the candle. But how do they do so? We contrasted a nonliteral syntactic analysis account, according to which people compute a syntactic analysis appropriate for this nonliteral meaning, with a nonliteral semantic analysis account, according to which they arrive at this meaning via purely semantic analysis. The nonliteral syntactic but not semantic reanalysis account postulates that people consider not only a literal-but-implausible double-object (DO) analysis in comprehending The mother gave the candle the daughter, but also a nonliteral-but-plausible prepositional-object (PO) analysis (i.e., including to before the daughter). In three structural priming experiments, participants heard a plausible or implausible DO or PO prime sentence. They then answered a comprehension question first or described a picture of a dative event first. In line with the nonliteral syntactic analysis account, priming was reduced following implausible than plausible sentences and following nonliterally than literally-interpreted implausible sentences. We argue that comprehenders project a plausible analysis before they have encountered the whole sentence (e.g., a PO analysis at the candle for The mother gave the candle the daughter) and that this analysis is often maintained even if it turns to be incorrect.