Patterns over rules
A central debate in language use concerns how speakers process and generate novel utterances. While traditional generative accounts suggest that learners abstract a system of formal rules to generate new utterances, usage-based frameworks propose a simpler mechanism: speakers memorize recurring language patterns and create new expressions by analogy, rendering explicit linguistic rules redundant. This talk presents case studies from Hungarian and Finnish phonology (vowel harmony) as well as Hungarian morphology and syntax. These phenomena are cleanly accounted for by analogical generalization, whereas rule-based models struggle to accommodate the observed variations without relying on increasingly ad hoc mechanisms.
