Linguistic competence vs linguistic performance

LINGUISTIC COMPETENCE vs LINGUISTIC PERFORMANCE

Linguistic competence and linguistic performance are two key concepts in the field of linguistics that play crucial roles in understanding language. Coined by Noam Chomsky, these terms help delineate the intricate relationship between the inherent knowledge of a language and its actual use in real-world situations.

Chomsky talks about two important things in language study: competence and performance. He describes 'competence' as an idealized capacity that is located as a psychological or mental property or function and ‘performance’ as the production of actual utterances. Competence is like an ideal person who knows a language perfectly, without any memory or attention problems, and can use it perfectly. Performance is the actual speaking or writing that a person does. According to Chomsky, competence is the mental ability behind language use, and for performance to truly show competence, it needs to happen in an ideal situation without any memory or attention issues. Chomsky says that studying real speech with mistakes won't give good data, so we need to separate the study of competence from the study of performance. He disagrees with criticisms that say we should focus on studying real speech patterns and habits because it limits our ability to develop a theory of actual performance.

In short, competence involves “knowing” the language and performance involves “doing” something with the language. The difficulty with this construct is that it is very difficult to assess competence without assessing performance.

Competence Determines Performance: According to Chomsky and the generative grammar tradition, linguistic competence serves as the basis for linguistic performance. Competence provides individuals with the internalized rules and structures of their language, and performance is the observable manifestation of this underlying competence. Performance may not always perfectly reflect competence due to external factors.

Performance Influences Competence: Some linguistic theories and researchers argue that linguistic performance, including real-world language use and exposure to diverse linguistic contexts, can influence and shape linguistic competence. Through actual language use, individuals may refine and adapt their internalized linguistic knowledge.

In summary, the relationship between linguistic competence and performance is complex, and the direction of influence may depend on the theoretical perspective. Traditional generative grammar emphasizes the primacy of competence, while other approaches acknowledge the bidirectional influence between competence and performance.