linguistic competence and performence

Linguistic competence refers to the knowledge of a language system. The term

first emerged in the work of Noam Chomsky, where it referred specifically to

syntactic competence, and was specifically opposed to linguistic performance. The

term was used more broadly by Dell Hymes in formulating the concept of

communicative competence. Like communicative competence, language competence

is often divided into various subcompetences, such as syntactic competence and

lexical competence.

According to Chomsky, competence is the ideal speaker /hearer, i.e. an idealized

but not a real person who would have a complete knowledge of language. This means

a person’s ability to create and understand sentences, including sentences they have

never heard before.Performance is the actual use of the language by individuals in

speech and writing.

Speakers’ linguistic knowledge permits them to form longer and longer

sentences by joining sentences and phases together or adding modifiers to a noun.

whether you stop at three, five or eighteen adjectives, it is impossible to limit the

number you could add if desired. Very long sentences are theoretically possible, but

they are highly improbable.

Evidently, there is a difference between having the knowledge necessary to

produce sentences of a language, and applying this knowledge. It is a difference

between what you know, which is your linguistic competence, and how you use this

knowledge in actual speech production and comprehension, which is your linguistic

performance.

When we speak, we usually wish to convey some message. At some stage in the

act of producing speech, we must organize our thoughts into strings of words.

Sometimes the message is garbled. We may stammer, or pause, or produce slips of the

tongue. We may even sound like the baby, who illustrates the difference between

linguistic knowledge and the way we use that knowledge in performance.

Linguistic competence is the system of linguistic knowledge possessed

by native speakers of a language, it is in contrast to the concept of Linguistic

performance, the way the language system is used in communication. The concept

was first introduced by Noam Chomsky[1] as part of the foundations for his

Generative grammar, but it has since been adopted and developed by other linguists,

particularly those working in the generativist tradition. In the generativist tradition

competence is the only level of language that is studied, because this level gives

insights into the Universal Grammar, that generativists see as underlying all human

language systems. Functional theories of grammar tend to dismiss the sharp

distinction between competence and performance, and particularly the primacy given

to the study of competence.

According to Chomsky, competence is the 'ideal' language system that makes it possible for

speakers to produce and understand an infinite number [nb 1] of sentences in their language, and to

distinguish grammatical sentences from ungrammatical sentences. This is unaffected by

"grammatically irrelevant conditions" such as speech errors.[1] Competence versus performance

"Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a

completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows 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[1]

Chomsky differentiates competence, which is an idealized capacity, from

performance being the production of actual utterances. According to him, competence

is the ideal speaker-hearer's knowledge of his or her language and it is the 'mental

reality' which is responsible for all those aspects of language use which can be

characterized as 'linguistic'.[2] Chomsky argues that only under an idealized situation

whereby the speaker-hearer is unaffected by grammatically irrelevant conditions such

as memory limitations and distractions will performance be a direct reflection of

competence. A sample of natural speech consisting of numerous false starts and other

deviations will not provide such data. Therefore, he claims that a fundamental

distinction has to be made between the competence and performance.[1]

Chomsky dismissed criticisms of delimiting the study of performance in favor of

the study of underlying competence, as unwarranted and completely misdirected. He

claims that the descriptivist limitation-in-principle to classification and organization

of data, the "extracting patterns" from a corpus of observed speech and the describing

"speech habits" etc. are the core factors that precludes the development of a theory of

actual performance.