Exemplar theory in linguistics: a perspective for the cognitive subject

Communication to the 11th Congress of Cognitive Linguistics, Bordeaux, 19-21 May 2005. Proceedings in press.The theory of exemplars was initially developed in psychology and has been applied with success to phonology.The paper shows how the track can be prolonged into syntax.The result is an account of the linguistic fact which inherently accommodates inter-speaker variation, and the acquisitional sigmoid curves, within the same theoretical frame in which, for example, syntactic analysis can be reconstructed as leveled analogical mappings. This is achieved without postulating rules, categories or constrains. In short, grammar itself is ruled-out. Actually, the tenet is that, in a cognitive perspective, postulating a language is wrong in the first place because a speaker does not learn a language, he/she just learns how to speak; and this is not the same thing. At this expense, the linguistic dynamics, i.e. the processes, can be co-explicated much more simply