Competence and performance

Competence enables native speaker to recognise ambiguous sentences or accept even apparently meaningless sentences as syntactically correct (and even making some sense).

Examples:

She read the book I gave her last week. and

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. ⁴

Performance may be flawed/ ungrammatical, due to attention/ memory lapses or other psychological factors - so cannot be taken at face value. The ``raw data'' has to be ``idealised''.

Recall

• De Saussure: langue vs parole (cf Searle's Chinese room) The mentalism is similar to Chomsky but unlike him is de Saussure's atomism - building up from simple to complex; also less attention to properties of sentences. (Contrariwise Chomsky has been criticised for promoting a ``non-semiotic paradigm'' (ignoring the relationships between sound and meaning) and thus rejecting the essence of De Saussure's insights - eg. see AUG Applicative Universal Grammar)

• Bloomfieldians: prescriptive vs descriptive (Chomsky's performance-competence distinction is different because it does not accept that all uttered responses are equally correct. Also here ``competence'' excludes rules which are out of common usage, eg. ``It is I.'')

  Like the earlier structuralists (Bloomfield and Harris) Chomsky focused on the formal structures of language and claimed the autonomy of syntax (from semantics and pragmatics of language). But unlike them, Chomsky challenged behaviourism and emphasised creative open-endedness of syntax.