No assumption is more fundamental in the theory (and practice) of syntax than

Exemplar-based models of language propose that human language production and understanding operate with a store of concrete linguistic experiences rather than with abstract linguistic rules. While exemplarbased models are well acknowledged in areas like phonology and morphology, common wisdom has it that they are intrinsically flawed for syntax where infinite generative capacity is needed. This paper shows that this common wisdom is wrong. It starts out by reviewing an exemplar-based syntactic model, known as Data-Oriented Parsing, or DOP, which operates on a corpus of phrase-structure trees. While this model is productive, it is inadequate from the point of grammatical productivity. We therefore extend it to the more sophisticated linguistic representations proposed by Lexical-Functional Grammar theory, resulting in the model known as LFG-DOP, which does allow for meta-linguistic judgments of acceptability. We show how DOP deals with first language acquisition, suggesting a unified model for language learning and language use, and go into a number of syntactic phenomena that can be explained by DOP but that challenge rulebased models. We argue that if there is anything innate in language cognition it is not Universal Grammar but “Universal Representation”. 1.

The main goal of this paper is to argue for an approach to optimization in syntax that is not global (as is standardly assumed), but local, in the sense that syntactic optimization procedures can affect only small portions of syntactic structure. Local optimization presupposes harmonic serialism (rather than harmonic parallelism), i.e., a derivational organization of grammar. In line with this, I set out to reconcile optimality theory with the minimalist program (see Chomsky (2000), Chomsky (2001)), a derivational approach in which phrase structure is created incrementally. I argue that local optimization is both conceptually attractive (because it significantly reduces complexity) and supported by empirical evidence. As a case study, I develop an analysis of a shape conservation phenomenon in German that involves repair-driven movement operations at the clause edge. I show that, other things being equal, local optimization succeeds where global optimization fails.