Linguistic Performance and Competence Essay

linguistic Knowledge Speakers lingual knowledge permits them to form endless and longer sentences by joining sentences and phases together or adding modifiers to a noun. whether you deterrent at three, five or eighteen adjectives, it is im contingent to limit the lean you could add if desired. Very long sentences atomic number 18 theoretically possible, but they are highly improbable. Evidently, there is a diversity between having the knowledge inevitable to produce sentences of a language, and applying this knowledge.It is a difference between what you know, which your linguistic competencyis, and how you use this knowledge in movementual speech production and comprehension, which is your linguistic work. Linguistic Performance Linguistic Performance a speakers unfeigned use of language in real situations what the speaker real says, including well-formed errors and other non-linguistic features such as hesitations and other disfluencies. When we speak, we usually need 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, orpause, 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 Linguistic competence is a term employ by speech experts and anthropologists to describe how language is defined within a community of speakers.This term applies to mastering the combination of sounds, syntax and semantics known as the grammar of a language. ACCORDING TO CHOMSKY, COMPETENCE IS THE IDEAL LANGUAGE SYSTEM THAT makes it possible for speakers to produce and understand an infinitenumber of sentences in their language, and to distinguish grammatical sentences from ungrammatical sentences.oThis means a persons ability to frame and understand sentences, including sentences they have never heard before . Competence versus Performance Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a only homogeneous speech-communication, who know its (the speech communitys) language utterly and that it is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) inapplying his knowledge of this language in actual performance. Chomsky differentiates competence, which is an idealized capacity, from performance being the production of actual utterances. According to him, competence is the ideal speaker-hearers knowledge of his or her language and it is the mental humankind 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 distractionswill performance be a direct reflection of competence.A sample of infixed speech consisting of numerous false starts and other deviations will not leave such selective information. Therefore, he claims that a fundamental distinction has to be do between the competence and performance. Chomsky dismissed criticisms of delimiting the contract of performance in favour of the study of underlying competence, as unwarranted and completely misdirected.He claims that the descriptivist limitation-in-principle to sorting and organization of data, theextracting 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. Chomsky thinks that what linguists should study is the ideal speakers competence, not his performance, which is too haphazard to be studied.Although a speaker possesses an internalized set of rules and applies them in actual use, he cannot promise exactly what these rules are. So the task of a linguist is to determine from the data of performance the underlying system of rules that has been mastered by the language user.