Linguistic competence and performance

I. LANGUAGE AND GRAMMAR

A natural language (e.g, English, Polish, Ukrainian, as distinguished from e.g. computer programming languages) is a complex system or rules, partially biologically determined, which people use when they think speak, listen to the speech of others etc.

Language users have no conscious knowledge of the language rules, This knowledge is represented in their mind in some way and they employ it (access it) when they use the language.

The tacit, subconscious knowledge of the rules of language is called linguistic competence

The linguistic competence of the speakers is what the grammarians try to describe

Linguistic competence has to be distinguished from linguistic performance – what we actually do when we put our linguistic competence to use e.g. by speaking a language. Thus, the competence is the knowledge of language and the performance is the linguistic behaviour.

The main factor underlying linguistic performance is linguistic competence but it is not the only factor. What we actually say – our utterances- is shaped by several different factors, many of which have nothing to do with grammar – such as our memory capacity, attention span, various distractions, interruptions, changes in communicative intention (what we want to say) etc

As a result what is uttered need not be a grammatical sentence (i.e. may violate the rules of the language). Below is an example of such an utterance.

* John should.. oh no, I meant….er… well, who cares

What is more, there are grammatical expressions which are unlikely to be ever. uttered, because they are too long and complex. This has nothing to do with grammatical rules but rather with limitations on our processing capabilities, short time memory, attention span etc.

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John’s father’s cousin’s mother’s uncle’s friend’s sister’s teacher’s brother’s student’s wife

In fact, the grammatical rules of our linguistic competence, which allow us to accept the above construction as well-formed, do not impose any limit on its length. However, in the realm of performance, it is obvious that if nothing else, the human life- span puts a definite limit on the length of an expression that we could ever utter.

Language structure

Natural languages are structured in peculiar way that involves different levels of organization.

Each of these levels involves rules of a different kind which form separate subcomponents (or modules) of linguistic competence:

Phonology – how words and sentences are pronounced (e.g. Final consonant in Polish is devoiced)

Morphology - how minimal meaningful units – morphemes are combined to form words

(e.g. tense affix – ed appears at the end, negative affix un - at the beginning of a word)

Syntax - how words are combined to form phrases and sentences (e.g. determiner precedes the noun it modifies)

Semantics – how meaning (the conceptual structure) relates to the form of language – its words (lexical semantics) and sentences (sentence semantics) (e.g. subject of the verb hit is interpreted as a performer of the action of hitting)

Pragmatics -how language is used in a context - discourse context, physical context of the utterance or the context of what the hearer assumes to be true about the world. (e.g. pragmatic rules explains why the sentence “ Could you pass the salt?” is interpreted in most situations as a request for action not for information and why “ John frightened a stone ” is considered odd.)