Linguistic competence
Encyclopedia
Linguistic competence is the system of linguistic knowledge possessed by native speaker
s 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
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 In his use of "infinite number", Chomsky assumed no upper bound for the length of a sentence. See countable infinity. of sentences in their language, and to distinguish grammatical sentences from ungrammatical sentences. This is unaffected by "grammatically irrelevant conditions" such as speech errors. Linguistic competence includes components such as phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics and morphology.
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
'. 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.
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.
,The term 'grammar' here is used in its broadest sense, referring to the system of linguistic knowledge in the mind of the speaker. It is not limited to syntax but also is extended to include sound and meaning. or set of language rules, that is represented mentally and manifested based on his or her own understanding of acceptable usage in a given linguistic idiom. Therefore, grammatical competence defines an innate knowledge of rules rather than knowledge of items or relations. According to Chomsky, it is regarded to be innate because one does not have to be trained to develop it and will still be able to apply it in an infinite number of unheard examples.
The core components of the grammar are included in the speaker's linguistic competence and these components corresponds to five of the major subfields of linguistics:
, being a result of human evolution. One of the key figures quoted by Chomsky as a spark for his ideas included Wilhelm von Humboldt
who advocated the "creative" aspect of language and that a grammar must be existent to describe the process that makes a language possible to "make infinite use of finite means". Another key figure is Ferdinand de Saussure
and his idea of langue and parole but however, Chomsky rejects Saussure's notion of langue as "merely a systematic inventory of items" but rather chooses to conceptualize a model of underlying competence regarded as "a system of generative processess". Another major influence is René Descartes
whose concern with the creative powers of the mind leads him to regard human language as an instrument of thought.
A generative grammar
is a finite set of rules that could hypothetically produce an infinitive number of utterances. It enables humans to generate all kinds of sentences and never to produce an ungrammatical sentence. In Chomsky's own words:
Chomsky's notion of linguistic competence is purely syntactic.
, within the generative school of thought. They assume a modular lexicon, a set of lexical entries containing semantic, syntactic and phonological information deemed necessary to parse a sentence.
In the generative lexicalist view this information is intimately tied up with linguistic competence. Nevertheless, their models are still in line with the mainstream generative research in adhering to strong innateness, modularity and autonomy of syntax.
as the main generative component from which meaning
and phonology
is developed unlike Chomsky. According to him, a generative grammar consists of five major components: the lexicon
, the base component, the transformational component, the phonological component and the semantic component.
The Five Major Components of the Generative Grammar
Againsting the syntax-centered view of generative grammar(syntactocentrism), he specifically treats phonology
, syntax
and semantics
as three parallel generative processes, coordinated through interface processes. He further subdivides each of those three processes into various "tiers", themselves coordinated by interfaces. Yet, he clarifies that those interfaces are not sensitive to every aspect of the processes they coordinate. For instance, phonology is affected by some aspects of syntax, but not vice versa.
proposes that the lexicon becomes an active and central component in the linguistic description. The essence of his theory is that the lexicon functions generatively, first by providing a rich and expressive vocabulary for characterizing lexical information; then, by developing a framework for manipulating fine-grained distinctions in word descriptions; and finally, by formalizing a set of mechanisms for specialized composition of aspects of such descriptions of words, as they occur in context, extended and novel sense are generated.
an explicit part of generative grammar, more incisive studies of meaning would be possible. Since they assume that semantic representations are not formally similar to syntactic structure, they suggest a complete linguistic description must therefore include a new set of rules, a semantic component, to relate meanings to syntactic and/or phonological structure. Their theory can be reflected by their slogan "linguistic description minus grammar equals semantics".
An argument used by functionalist linguists against the strict division between competence and performance and the primacy of competence, is that a language theory based on an autonomous level of competence encounters difficulties when trying to explain language change
and grammaticalization, which can only be explained as changes in performance directly causing changes in the competence level.
Another common critique of the generativist concept of competence is that the underlying presupposition that the felicity of grammatical constructions is judged based only on its relation to competence is incorrect and does not fit the data from actual usage where the felicity of an utterance often depends largely on the communicative context.
Functionalist theorists have also argued that the competence/performance distinction basically serves to privilege data from certain linguistic genres and socio-linguistic registers
that are judged by speakers to be more prestigious, while discounting evidence from low-prestige genres and registers as being simply mis-performance.
Cognitive grammar, one of several functionalist theoretical frameworks, was developed by Ronald Langacker
to understand language as a result of cognitive mechanisms and processes and not from the grammar of the language. Within this school of thought, linguistic competence involves the ability to adequately construct and fully understand expressions by means of language itself and additional resources such as memory, intentionality, general knowledge etc. It also includes our knowledge to make abstractions, which allows us to conceive of words in isolation.
is primarily concerned with language as a psychological phonomenon. It provides insights into how we assemble our own speech and writing and how we understand that of others; into how we store and use vocabulary; into how we manage to acquire language in the first place. According to experimental linguist N.S. Sutherland, the task of psycholinguistics is not to confirm Chomsky's account of linguistic competence by undertaking experiments. It is by doing experiments, to find out what are the mechanisms that underlie linguistic competence. Psycholinguistics generally do not see the distinction between performance and competence to accurately reflect the empirical data, but tend to prefer usage based theories.
There are 3 important elements of psycholinguistics that are used to describe the mechanisms underlying our language understanding and production.
(i) The language signal
This refers to all forms of language expression, such as writing and speech, which are generated and perceived by language users. The most striking characteristic of the language signal is its perceptual invariance, both in writing and in speech, as there is always a salient and stable form that stands out against its physical environment. In our perception of such forms, gaps are closed, and irregularities are overlooked.
(ii) Operations of our neuropsychological system
The operations of our neuropsychological systems determine how language signals are perceived and generated. For both speech and writing, there are two very different sorts of biological system involved. Speech involves auditory pathways from sensory organs to the brain then the vocal tract
whilst writing involves motor pathways from sensory organs to the brain followed by the hand-arm system. However, they do have a similarity in that both involve short pathways to the central processing areas in the brain, regarded as the central language area.
(iii) Language System
This is more abstract than the first two since it may be implemented even when we are not using palpable language signals at all, as in silent verbal reasoning
, contemplation of our language and general language knowledge .
, which focuses on socially-situated performance, was developed by Dell Hymes
in response to the abstract nature of linguistic competence. Communicative competence is also sometimes referred to as pragmatic or sociolinguistic competence, especially when the emphasis is on how to interpret the speaker's intended meaning in a particular utterance, apart from the literal meaning.
The major criticism towards Chomsky's notion of linguistic competence by Hymes is the inadequate distinction of competence and performance. Furthermore, he commented that it is unreal and that no significant progress in linguistics is possible without studying forms along with the ways in which they are used. As such, linguistic competence should fall under the domain of communicative competence since it comprises four competence areas, namely, linguistic, sociolinguistic, discourse
and strategic.
governs the human language system. He proposes the language acquisition device
(LAD), which is able to encode the major principles of a language and its grammatical structures in a child's brain. Children can then learn new vocabulary and apply the syntactic structures from the LAD to form sentences. His idea of the universal grammar thus, indicates that this theory can be extended to other languages such that all of them contain nouns, verbs, consonants and vowels and children appears to be 'hard-wired' to acquire the grammar.
Another view, held by scientists specializing in Language acquisition
such as Tomasello
argues that young children's early language is concrete and item-based which implies that their speech is based on the lexical items known to them from the environment and the language of their caretakers. In addition, children do not produce creative utterances about past experiences and future expectations because they have not had enough exposure to their target language to do so. Thus, this indicates that the exposure to language plays more of a role in a child's linguistic competence than just their innate abilities.
refers to a family of clinically diverse disorders that affect the ability to communicate by oral or written language, or both, following brain damage
. It is an umbrella concept combining a multiplicity of deficits involving one or more aspects of language use. In aphasia, the inherent neurological
damage is frequently assumed by some to be a loss of implicit linguistic competence that has damaged or wiped out neural centers or pathways that are necessary for maintenance of the language rules and representations needed to communicate. The measurement of implicit language competence, although apparently necessary and satisfying for theoretic linguistics
, is complexly interwoven with performance factors. Transience, stimulability, and variability in aphasia language use provide evidence for an access deficit model that supports performance loss.
When discussing the linguistic competence of a multilingual, both communicative competence and grammatical competence are often taken into consideration as it is imperative for a speaker to have the knowledge to use language correctly and accurately. To test for grammatical competence in a speaker, grammaticality judgments of utterances are often used. Communicative competence on the other hand, is assessed through the use of appropriate utterances in different setting.
, the relationship between deep structure
and surface structure can be easily demonstrated by the structural ambiguity
of sentences which is a key source for jokes.
For instance Groucho Marx's
line from Animal Crackers: One morning I shot an elephant in my pyjamas; how he got into my pyjamas I'll never know. The humor aspect lies in the fact that the surface structure of the main sentence expresses two possible grammatical sentences, in my pyjamas I shot an elephant and I shot an elephant who was wearing my pyjamas.
Hence, the discrete unit in my pyjamas plays a different grammatical role in the deep structure of the sentence.
Propositions by linguists such as Victor Raskin
and Salvatore Attardo
have been made stating that there are certain linguistic mechanisms (part of our linguistic competence) underlying our ability to understand humor and determine if something was meant to be a joke. Raskin puts forth a formal semantic theory of humor, which is now widely known as the semantic script theory of humor(SSTH). The semantic theory of humour is designed to model the native speaker's intuition with regard to humor or, in other words, his humor competence. The theory models and thus defines the concept of funniness and is formulated for an ideal speaker-hearer community i.e. for people whose senses of humor are exactly identical. Raskin's semantic theory of humor consists of two components - the set of all scripts available to speakers and a set of combinatorial rules. The term "script" used by Raskin in his semantic theory is used to refer to the lexical meaning of a word. The function of the combinatorial rules is then to combine all possible meaning of the scripts. Hence, Raskin posits that these are the two components which allows us to interpret humor.
Native Speaker
Native Speaker is Chang-Rae Lee’s first novel. In Native Speaker, he creates a man named Henry Park who tries to assimilate into American society and become a “native speaker.”-Plot summary:...
s of a language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
, it is in contrast to the concept of Linguistic performance
Linguistic performance
In linguistics, performance has two senses:It is also one of the two elements in Chomsky's performance-competence distinction, which relates to Language production , with an emphasis upon how this is different from Competence, or the mental knowledge of language itself...
, the way the language system is used in communication. The concept was first introduced by Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
as part of the foundations for his Generative grammar
Generative grammar
In theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of syntax. A generative grammar of a language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences...
, 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
Universal grammar
Universal grammar is a theory in linguistics that suggests that there are properties that all possible natural human languages have.Usually credited to Noam Chomsky, the theory suggests that some rules of grammar are hard-wired into the brain, and manifest themselves without being taught...
, 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 In his use of "infinite number", Chomsky assumed no upper bound for the length of a sentence. See countable infinity. of sentences in their language, and to distinguish grammatical sentences from ungrammatical sentences. This is unaffected by "grammatically irrelevant conditions" such as speech errors. Linguistic competence includes components such as phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics and morphology.
Competence versus performance
"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 that it 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." ~ChomskyChomskyChomsky Khomsk ") is a Belarus'-origin surname, and may refer to:* Aviva Chomsky , American historian* Carol Chomsky , American linguist and wife of Noam Chomsky* Elsie Chomsky, American educator...
,1965
Chomsky differentiates competence, which is an idealized capacity, from performance
Linguistic performance
In linguistics, performance has two senses:It is also one of the two elements in Chomsky's performance-competence distinction, which relates to Language production , with an emphasis upon how this is different from Competence, or the mental knowledge of language itself...
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
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
'. 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.
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.
Competence and components of grammar
One's competence is defined by the grammarGrammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...
,The term 'grammar' here is used in its broadest sense, referring to the system of linguistic knowledge in the mind of the speaker. It is not limited to syntax but also is extended to include sound and meaning. or set of language rules, that is represented mentally and manifested based on his or her own understanding of acceptable usage in a given linguistic idiom. Therefore, grammatical competence defines an innate knowledge of rules rather than knowledge of items or relations. According to Chomsky, it is regarded to be innate because one does not have to be trained to develop it and will still be able to apply it in an infinite number of unheard examples.
The core components of the grammar are included in the speaker's linguistic competence and these components corresponds to five of the major subfields of linguistics:
- PhoneticsPhoneticsPhonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, or—in the case of sign languages—the equivalent aspects of sign. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds or signs : their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory...
: The physical production and perception of the inventory of sounds used in producing language. - PhonologyPhonologyPhonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
: The mental organization of physical sounds and the patterns formed by the way sounds are combined in a language, and the restrictions on permissible sound combinations.
- E.g.: vs *slib and *sbill
- MorphologyMorphology (linguistics)In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
: The identification, analysis and description of units of meaning in a language. One will know the inflectional and derivational morphology present in the language, such as the affixes of words.
- Morphology
- E.g.: can be derived but not *re-rich
- SyntaxSyntaxIn linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
: The structure and formation of sentences. One can distinguish between grammatical sentences and ungrammatical sentences.
- Syntax
- E.g.: is acceptable but not *My hair needs wash
- SemanticsSemanticsSemantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....
: Understanding the meaning of sentences. This is also how a user of the language is able to understand and interpret the non-literal meaning in a given utterance. They are three distinctions drawn here:
- Semantics
- (i) Meaningful and non-meaningful sentences
- E.g.: is meaningful but not *The accident was looked by thousands
- (ii) Same structure but different meanings
- E.g.: but not *The cow was found by the farmer
- (iii) Different structures and still be able to relate the meanings
- E.g.:
Chomsky and Generative Grammar
Chomsky's perspective of language learning basically revolves around the idea that all humans have an internal capacity to acquire language. In other words, it implies that this ability to learn and analyze linguistic information is universal and innate, and Chomsky likened it to a language acquisition deviceLanguage acquisition device
The Language Acquisition Device is a postulated "organ" of the brain that is supposed to function as a congenital device for learning symbolic language . First proposed by Noam Chomsky, the LAD concept is an instinctive mental capacity which enables an infant to acquire and produce language. It is...
, being a result of human evolution. One of the key figures quoted by Chomsky as a spark for his ideas included Wilhelm von Humboldt
Wilhelm von Humboldt
Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand Freiherr von Humboldt was a German philosopher, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of Humboldt Universität. He is especially remembered as a linguist who made important contributions to the philosophy of language and to the theory and practice...
who advocated the "creative" aspect of language and that a grammar must be existent to describe the process that makes a language possible to "make infinite use of finite means". Another key figure is Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...
and his idea of langue and parole but however, Chomsky rejects Saussure's notion of langue as "merely a systematic inventory of items" but rather chooses to conceptualize a model of underlying competence regarded as "a system of generative processess". Another major influence is René Descartes
René Descartes
René Descartes ; was a French philosopher and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed the 'Father of Modern Philosophy', and much subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are studied closely to this day...
whose concern with the creative powers of the mind leads him to regard human language as an instrument of thought.
A generative grammar
Generative grammar
In theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of syntax. A generative grammar of a language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences...
is a finite set of rules that could hypothetically produce an infinitive number of utterances. It enables humans to generate all kinds of sentences and never to produce an ungrammatical sentence. In Chomsky's own words:
"...by a generative grammar I mean simply a system of rules that in some explicit and well-defined way assigns structural descriptions to sentences."
Chomsky's notion of linguistic competence is purely syntactic.
Other generativists
Linguistic competence is treated as more comprehensive term for lexicalists, such as Jackendoff and PustejovskyJames Pustejovsky
James Pustejovsky is a TJX Feldberg professor of computer science at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. His expertises are on Theoretical and computational modeling of language, specifically: Computational linguistics, Lexical semantics, Knowledge representation, temporal reasoning...
, within the generative school of thought. They assume a modular lexicon, a set of lexical entries containing semantic, syntactic and phonological information deemed necessary to parse a sentence.
In the generative lexicalist view this information is intimately tied up with linguistic competence. Nevertheless, their models are still in line with the mainstream generative research in adhering to strong innateness, modularity and autonomy of syntax.
Ray S. Jackendoff
Ray S. Jackendoff's model deviates from the traditional generative grammar in that it does not treat syntaxSyntax
In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
as the main generative component from which meaning
Meaning (linguistics)
In linguistics, meaning is what is expressed by the writer or speaker, and what is conveyed to the reader or listener, provided that they talk about the same thing . In other words if the object and the name of the object and the concepts in their head are the same...
and phonology
Phonology
Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
is developed unlike Chomsky. According to him, a generative grammar consists of five major components: the lexicon
Lexicon
In linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. A lexicon is also a synonym of the word thesaurus. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes. Coined in English 1603, the word "lexicon" derives from the Greek "λεξικόν" , neut...
, the base component, the transformational component, the phonological component and the semantic component.
The Five Major Components of the Generative Grammar
- The lexicon contains a list of the formatives of the language and their syntactic, phonological and the semantic properties. It also contains a set of redundancy rules which express morphological and semantic relationships among lexical items.
- The base component contains a context-free phrase structure grammar, consisting of a set of unordered rules which collectively expand the symbol S into phrase markers whose preterminal strings are lexical category symbols. The base also contains a set of lexical insertion rules, which freely insert lexical items by category into the preterminal strings to form deep structure.
- The transformational component consists of a set of transformations which collectively map deep structures.
- The phonological component maps surface structures into phonetic representations, as proposed in Chomsky and Halle(1968).
- The semantic component consists of at least four subcomponents: functional structure, modal structure, coreference relations and focus and presupposition.
Againsting the syntax-centered view of generative grammar(syntactocentrism), he specifically treats phonology
Phonology
Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
, syntax
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
and semantics
Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....
as three parallel generative processes, coordinated through interface processes. He further subdivides each of those three processes into various "tiers", themselves coordinated by interfaces. Yet, he clarifies that those interfaces are not sensitive to every aspect of the processes they coordinate. For instance, phonology is affected by some aspects of syntax, but not vice versa.
James Pustejovsky
In contrast to the static view of word meaning (where each word is characterized by a predetermined number of word senses) which imposes a tremendous bottleneck on the performance capability of any natural language processing system, PustejovskyJames Pustejovsky
James Pustejovsky is a TJX Feldberg professor of computer science at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. His expertises are on Theoretical and computational modeling of language, specifically: Computational linguistics, Lexical semantics, Knowledge representation, temporal reasoning...
proposes that the lexicon becomes an active and central component in the linguistic description. The essence of his theory is that the lexicon functions generatively, first by providing a rich and expressive vocabulary for characterizing lexical information; then, by developing a framework for manipulating fine-grained distinctions in word descriptions; and finally, by formalizing a set of mechanisms for specialized composition of aspects of such descriptions of words, as they occur in context, extended and novel sense are generated.
Katz & Fodor
Katz and Fodor suggests that a grammar should be thought of as a system of rules relating the externalized form of the sentences of a language to their meanings that are to be expressed in a universal semantic representation, just as sounds are expressed in a universal semantic representation. They hope that by making semanticsSemantics
Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....
an explicit part of generative grammar, more incisive studies of meaning would be possible. Since they assume that semantic representations are not formally similar to syntactic structure, they suggest a complete linguistic description must therefore include a new set of rules, a semantic component, to relate meanings to syntactic and/or phonological structure. Their theory can be reflected by their slogan "linguistic description minus grammar equals semantics".
Functionalist critiques of the generativist concept of Competence
Functionalist linguists forward a usage-based perspective on linguistic competence. They argue that linguistic competence is derived from and informed by language use, performance, taking the directly opposite view to the generative model. As a result, in functionalist theories emphasis is placed on experimental methods to understand the linguistic competence of individuals.An argument used by functionalist linguists against the strict division between competence and performance and the primacy of competence, is that a language theory based on an autonomous level of competence encounters difficulties when trying to explain language change
Language change
Language change is the phenomenon whereby phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and other features of language vary over time. The effect on language over time is known as diachronic change. Two linguistic disciplines in particular concern themselves with studying language change:...
and grammaticalization, which can only be explained as changes in performance directly causing changes in the competence level.
Another common critique of the generativist concept of competence is that the underlying presupposition that the felicity of grammatical constructions is judged based only on its relation to competence is incorrect and does not fit the data from actual usage where the felicity of an utterance often depends largely on the communicative context.
Functionalist theorists have also argued that the competence/performance distinction basically serves to privilege data from certain linguistic genres and socio-linguistic registers
Register (linguistics)
In linguistics, a register is a variety of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting. For example, when speaking in a formal setting an English speaker may be more likely to adhere more closely to prescribed grammar, pronounce words ending in -ing with a velar nasal...
that are judged by speakers to be more prestigious, while discounting evidence from low-prestige genres and registers as being simply mis-performance.
Cognitive grammar, one of several functionalist theoretical frameworks, was developed by Ronald Langacker
Ronald Langacker
Ronald Wayne Langacker is an American linguist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He is best known as one of the founders of the cognitive linguistics movement and the creator of Cognitive Grammar....
to understand language as a result of cognitive mechanisms and processes and not from the grammar of the language. Within this school of thought, linguistic competence involves the ability to adequately construct and fully understand expressions by means of language itself and additional resources such as memory, intentionality, general knowledge etc. It also includes our knowledge to make abstractions, which allows us to conceive of words in isolation.
Competence in Psycholinguistics
PsycholinguisticsPsycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the...
is primarily concerned with language as a psychological phonomenon. It provides insights into how we assemble our own speech and writing and how we understand that of others; into how we store and use vocabulary; into how we manage to acquire language in the first place. According to experimental linguist N.S. Sutherland, the task of psycholinguistics is not to confirm Chomsky's account of linguistic competence by undertaking experiments. It is by doing experiments, to find out what are the mechanisms that underlie linguistic competence. Psycholinguistics generally do not see the distinction between performance and competence to accurately reflect the empirical data, but tend to prefer usage based theories.
There are 3 important elements of psycholinguistics that are used to describe the mechanisms underlying our language understanding and production.
(i) The language signal
This refers to all forms of language expression, such as writing and speech, which are generated and perceived by language users. The most striking characteristic of the language signal is its perceptual invariance, both in writing and in speech, as there is always a salient and stable form that stands out against its physical environment. In our perception of such forms, gaps are closed, and irregularities are overlooked.
(ii) Operations of our neuropsychological system
The operations of our neuropsychological systems determine how language signals are perceived and generated. For both speech and writing, there are two very different sorts of biological system involved. Speech involves auditory pathways from sensory organs to the brain then the vocal tract
Vocal tract
The vocal tract is the cavity in human beings and in animals where sound that is produced at the sound source is filtered....
whilst writing involves motor pathways from sensory organs to the brain followed by the hand-arm system. However, they do have a similarity in that both involve short pathways to the central processing areas in the brain, regarded as the central language area.
(iii) Language System
This is more abstract than the first two since it may be implemented even when we are not using palpable language signals at all, as in silent verbal reasoning
Verbal reasoning
Verbal reasoning is understanding and reasoning using concepts framed in words. It aims at evaluating ability to think constructively, rather than at simple fluency or vocabulary recognition.-Verbal reasoning intelligence tests:...
, contemplation of our language and general language knowledge .
Communicative competence
Another functionalist theory advances the notion of communicative competenceCommunicative competence
Communicative competence is a term in linguistics which refers to a language user's grammatical knowledge of syntax, morphology, phonology and the like, as well as social knowledge about how and when to use utterances appropriately....
, which focuses on socially-situated performance, was developed by Dell Hymes
Dell Hymes
Dell Hathaway Hymes was a sociolinguist, anthropologist, and folklorist whose work dealt primarily with languages of the Pacific Northwest. He was one of the first to call the fourth subfield of anthropology "linguistic anthropology" instead of "anthropological linguistics"...
in response to the abstract nature of linguistic competence. Communicative competence is also sometimes referred to as pragmatic or sociolinguistic competence, especially when the emphasis is on how to interpret the speaker's intended meaning in a particular utterance, apart from the literal meaning.
The major criticism towards Chomsky's notion of linguistic competence by Hymes is the inadequate distinction of competence and performance. Furthermore, he commented that it is unreal and that no significant progress in linguistics is possible without studying forms along with the ways in which they are used. As such, linguistic competence should fall under the domain of communicative competence since it comprises four competence areas, namely, linguistic, sociolinguistic, discourse
Discourse
Discourse generally refers to "written or spoken communication". The following are three more specific definitions:...
and strategic.
Related areas of study
Linguistic competence is commonly used and discussed in many language acquisition studies. Some of the more common ones are in the language acquisition of children, aphasics and multilinguals.Child language
The language development of a child since birth to the time when he or she is able to utter full sentences is much studied. One view, strongly advocated by Chomsky, is that this ability is innate and that a universal grammarUniversal grammar
Universal grammar is a theory in linguistics that suggests that there are properties that all possible natural human languages have.Usually credited to Noam Chomsky, the theory suggests that some rules of grammar are hard-wired into the brain, and manifest themselves without being taught...
governs the human language system. He proposes the language acquisition device
Language acquisition device
The Language Acquisition Device is a postulated "organ" of the brain that is supposed to function as a congenital device for learning symbolic language . First proposed by Noam Chomsky, the LAD concept is an instinctive mental capacity which enables an infant to acquire and produce language. It is...
(LAD), which is able to encode the major principles of a language and its grammatical structures in a child's brain. Children can then learn new vocabulary and apply the syntactic structures from the LAD to form sentences. His idea of the universal grammar thus, indicates that this theory can be extended to other languages such that all of them contain nouns, verbs, consonants and vowels and children appears to be 'hard-wired' to acquire the grammar.
Another view, held by scientists specializing in Language acquisition
Language acquisition
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use words to understand and communicate. This capacity involves the picking up of diverse capacities including syntax, phonetics, and an extensive vocabulary. This language might be vocal as with...
such as Tomasello
Michael Tomasello
Michael Tomasello is an American developmentalpsychologist. He is a co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.-Life:...
argues that young children's early language is concrete and item-based which implies that their speech is based on the lexical items known to them from the environment and the language of their caretakers. In addition, children do not produce creative utterances about past experiences and future expectations because they have not had enough exposure to their target language to do so. Thus, this indicates that the exposure to language plays more of a role in a child's linguistic competence than just their innate abilities.
Aphasia
AphasiaAphasia
Aphasia is an impairment of language ability. This class of language disorder ranges from having difficulty remembering words to being completely unable to speak, read, or write....
refers to a family of clinically diverse disorders that affect the ability to communicate by oral or written language, or both, following brain damage
Brain damage
"Brain damage" or "brain injury" is the destruction or degeneration of brain cells. Brain injuries occur due to a wide range of internal and external factors...
. It is an umbrella concept combining a multiplicity of deficits involving one or more aspects of language use. In aphasia, the inherent neurological
Neurology
Neurology is a medical specialty dealing with disorders of the nervous system. Specifically, it deals with the diagnosis and treatment of all categories of disease involving the central, peripheral, and autonomic nervous systems, including their coverings, blood vessels, and all effector tissue,...
damage is frequently assumed by some to be a loss of implicit linguistic competence that has damaged or wiped out neural centers or pathways that are necessary for maintenance of the language rules and representations needed to communicate. The measurement of implicit language competence, although apparently necessary and satisfying for theoretic linguistics
Theoretical linguistics
Theoretical linguistics is the branch of linguistics that is most concerned with developing models of linguistic knowledge. The fields that are generally considered the core of theoretical linguistics are syntax, phonology, morphology, and semantics...
, is complexly interwoven with performance factors. Transience, stimulability, and variability in aphasia language use provide evidence for an access deficit model that supports performance loss.
Multilingualism
The definition of a multilingual The term multilingual is also commonly used to refer to a bilingual. is one that has not always been very clear-cut. In defining a multilingual, the pronunciation, morphology and syntax used by the speaker in the language are key criteria used in the assessment. Sometimes the mastery of the vocabulary is also taken into consideration but it is not the most important criteria as one can acquire the lexicon in the language without knowing the proper use of it.When discussing the linguistic competence of a multilingual, both communicative competence and grammatical competence are often taken into consideration as it is imperative for a speaker to have the knowledge to use language correctly and accurately. To test for grammatical competence in a speaker, grammaticality judgments of utterances are often used. Communicative competence on the other hand, is assessed through the use of appropriate utterances in different setting.
Understanding humour
Language is often implicated in humor. In relation to the generative grammarGenerative grammar
In theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of syntax. A generative grammar of a language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences...
, the relationship between deep structure
Deep structure
In linguistics, specifically in the study of syntax in the tradition of generative grammar , the deep structure of a linguistic expression is a theoretical construct that seeks to unify several related structures. For example, the sentences "Pat loves Chris" and "Chris is loved by Pat" mean...
and surface structure can be easily demonstrated by the structural ambiguity
Pragmatics
Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, and linguistics. It studies how the...
of sentences which is a key source for jokes.
For instance Groucho Marx's
Groucho Marx
Julius Henry "Groucho" Marx was an American comedian and film star famed as a master of wit. His rapid-fire delivery of innuendo-laden patter earned him many admirers. He made 13 feature films with his siblings the Marx Brothers, of whom he was the third-born...
line from Animal Crackers: One morning I shot an elephant in my pyjamas; how he got into my pyjamas I'll never know. The humor aspect lies in the fact that the surface structure of the main sentence expresses two possible grammatical sentences, in my pyjamas I shot an elephant and I shot an elephant who was wearing my pyjamas.
Hence, the discrete unit in my pyjamas plays a different grammatical role in the deep structure of the sentence.
Propositions by linguists such as Victor Raskin
Victor Raskin
Victor Raskin is a distinguished professor of linguistics at Purdue University. He is the author of Semantic Mechanisms of Humor and Ontological Semantics and founding editor of Humor, the journal for the International Society of Humor Studies.He is an associate director and founding faculty...
and Salvatore Attardo
Salvatore Attardo
Salvatore Attardo is a full professor at Texas A & M University-Commerce and the editor-in-chief of Humor, the journal for the International Society of Humor Research. He studied at Purdue University under Victor Raskin and extended Raskin's script-based semantic theory of humor into the general...
have been made stating that there are certain linguistic mechanisms (part of our linguistic competence) underlying our ability to understand humor and determine if something was meant to be a joke. Raskin puts forth a formal semantic theory of humor, which is now widely known as the semantic script theory of humor(SSTH). The semantic theory of humour is designed to model the native speaker's intuition with regard to humor or, in other words, his humor competence. The theory models and thus defines the concept of funniness and is formulated for an ideal speaker-hearer community i.e. for people whose senses of humor are exactly identical. Raskin's semantic theory of humor consists of two components - the set of all scripts available to speakers and a set of combinatorial rules. The term "script" used by Raskin in his semantic theory is used to refer to the lexical meaning of a word. The function of the combinatorial rules is then to combine all possible meaning of the scripts. Hence, Raskin posits that these are the two components which allows us to interpret humor.
See also
- Communicative competenceCommunicative competenceCommunicative competence is a term in linguistics which refers to a language user's grammatical knowledge of syntax, morphology, phonology and the like, as well as social knowledge about how and when to use utterances appropriately....
- Generative GrammarGenerative grammarIn theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of syntax. A generative grammar of a language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences...
- Linguistic performanceLinguistic performanceIn linguistics, performance has two senses:It is also one of the two elements in Chomsky's performance-competence distinction, which relates to Language production , with an emphasis upon how this is different from Competence, or the mental knowledge of language itself...
- Universal GrammarUniversal grammarUniversal grammar is a theory in linguistics that suggests that there are properties that all possible natural human languages have.Usually credited to Noam Chomsky, the theory suggests that some rules of grammar are hard-wired into the brain, and manifest themselves without being taught...
External links
- Competence vs Performance in Linguistic research
- Linguistic Competence and Performance from Principia Cybernetica Web
- Understanding Linguistic Competence vs Performance - A Quick Note
- Linguistic Competence and Grammar
- Some Comments on Competence and Performance by George A. Miller, The Rockefeller University
- Foundations of Language: Brian, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution Review of Ray Jackendoff
- The 'Language Instinct' Debate by Geoffrey Sampson (E-Book)