Applied Linguistics Assignment 4 Mai Mustafa Fouad Ra fat Ali 3rd year, General Roll N : 40 kkk

Competence and Performance

There is a difference between a native speaker s knowledge of a language and how he/she applies this knowledge in different situations.

Linguistic Competence (Noam Chomsky) 1965

Competence is simply all about implied knowledge . Every native speaker has this knowledge, and it makes him/her able to determine what is acceptable and what is unacceptable in his/her language, even if he cannot explain the grammatical rules. Linguistic competence is a term first developed by Noam Chomsky in 1960s, and it is related to his theory of generative grammar and Universal Grammar. Chomsky believes that this competence is innate and unconscious. Native speakers did not learn from grammar books that Where you are going? is ungrammatical, while Where are you going? is grammatical, yet they can use the language correctly and proficiently. What proves that is that when a person has an accident or suffers a trauma, he/she becomes speechless and unable to speak; still, they have the same proficiency of their language as their fellow native speakers. Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-communication, who know its (the speech community's) language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of this language in actual performance. (Chomsky, 1965, p. 3)

Communicative Competence and Performance (D. H. Hymes) 1971

Unlike linguistic competence, performance is observed. While linguistic competence is about knowledge, performance is about the application of this knowledge in different social situations. Performance helps in developing and improving competence, so both complement each other. Communicative competence is a term coined by Dell Hymes. He expressed another point of view of language with reference to its psychological, sociolinguistic and pragmatic aspects. For example, communicative competence and performance answer the questions: what are the appropriate utterances that can be used in different situations?, how to identify the different types and genres of text and how to read them appropriately as well..etc.

Saussure s Langue and Parole

The Swiss structuralist linguist Ferdinand de Saussure makes a distinction between linguistic competence and communicative competence through his premise of langue (=language) and parole (=speech). La langue or language is the system of language including syntax, semantics, spelling, phonology, punctuation..etc i.e theoretical knowledge of language. These elements form speech or parole which is, on the other hand, the tangible form of language i.e the utterances including different speech acts. Thus, parole is palpable because we actually use it in our daily life.

C o m p e t e n ce a n d G r a m m a r
y Rules
Although we were not taught how to use our own language, that does not mean that when we use the language, we do not have a set of grammatical rules to adhere to. We do not just memorize the words and arrange them haphazardly to form a sentence and that is it. Native speakers use these words and arrange them according to the syntactic rules they naturally know to produce an infinite number of utterances. However, if a native speaker makes a mistake, does this mean he/she is not familiar with the rule that should be used? The answer is definitely: no. What proves that our first language is rule-governed is children s over-generalization of these rules. For example, a child may hear the sentence This book is his and This is his book from the parents, but what happens is that the child may generalize the rule and says: This is mine book although the parents never use this structure.

E-Language and I-Language

To illustrate the difference between competence and performance, a similar distinction between I-language and E-language should be highlighted. E-language is simply the external reflection of the inner I-language. E-language is concerned with the political, social, mathematical or logical aspects of knowledge, while I-language is concerned with the individual knowledge. Therefore, I-language is less general than E-language. It may be acceptable for the E-language to include only a well-formed set of sentences, but it is unacceptable at all to apply the same idea to the I-language. It just cannot be a clear-cut separation between the grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. For example, if we consider the sentences The books you should read before it becomes difficult to talk about and The books you should read before talking about becomes difficult , we will agree that the first sentence is more acceptable than the second although both are considered not fully appropriate.

y Grammaticality and Acceptability

Not always ungrammatical utterances are unacceptable. In daily speech, there are some elements (e.g.: hesitation, false starts, repetitions..etc) that are far from being grammatical but are acceptable and unlikely to be rejected and criticized by the interlocutors. For example, the utterance Morphology is..um the study of word formed..I mean formation .word formation processes is totally acceptable in everyday speech. In other words, what is more important than the well-formedness and the complete grammatical accuracy of utterances is fluency, content and the pragmatic appropriateness . On the other hand the utterance Cats people keep purr is appropriate as far as linguistic competence is concerned but is less acceptable as far as performance is concerned.

Performance and Pragmatics

y Relevance
Relevance is very important in speech because it is essential to not only know what is being said, but also why it is said. In daily speech, we do not just decipher or decode the utterances, but we use the decoded form in order to draw inferences to understand the speaker s message. Relevance requires us to, as mentioned above, draw references as well as disambiguate and interpret vague and unclear utterances. To help in understanding messages, there are other paralinguistic elements the most important of which is context. For example, the word pupil can be interpreted either the person or part of the eye . If the neighboring utterances include the words: class, teacher, homework..etc, the obvious meaning would be student , but if they are iris, lens, cornea, macula, retina etc, the meaning would be the part of the eye .

Sources:
1. The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, volume II p.643:648 2. http://changingminds.org/explanations/critical_theory/concepts/langue_parole.htm 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_competence