Last altered 29 March 2010
The downloadable version was written in 2001 and finalised in April 2002. It was published in a collection called Mismatch: Form-function Incongruity and the Architecture of Grammar, edited by Elaine Francis and Laura Michaelis and published by CSLI, pages 355-402.
After a careful definition of default inheritance, the paper proposes that this is the correct explanation for every kind of mismatch. In support of this suggestion there is a fairly detailed discussion of word order mismatches in English, followed by a brief re-analysis of the word-order data from Zapotec that Broadwell has used as evidence for Optimality Theory. The rest of the paper surveys 19 different kinds of mismatch in order to show how they can be treated by default inheritance as exceptions to defaults. The last section considers implications for the architecture of language.