COMPETENCE AND PERFORMANCE

Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language | 1998 | 700+ words | Copyright

COMPETENCE AND PERFORMANCE. In LINGUISTICS, the distinction between a person's knowledge of language (competence) and use of it (performance). Performance contains slips of the tongue and false starts, and represents only a small sample of possible utterances: I own two-thirds of an emu is a good English sentence, but is unlikely to occur in any collected sample. The terms were proposed by Noam CHOMSKY in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, when he stressed the need for a GENERATIVE GRAMMAR that mirrors a speaker's competence and captures the creative aspect of linguistic ability. In Knowledge of Language (1986), Chomsky replaced the terms with I-language (internalized language) and E-language (externalized language). A similar dichotomy, LANGUE and PAROLE, was proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure (1915), who stressed the social aspects of langue, regarding it as shared knowledge, whereas Chomsky stressed the individual nature of competence. See COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE, MISTAKE.

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TOM McARTHUR. "COMPETENCE AND PERFORMANCE." Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language. 1998. Encyclopedia.com. 29 May. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>.

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TOM McARTHUR. "COMPETENCE AND PERFORMANCE." Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language. 1998. Retrieved May 29, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O29-COMPETENCEANDPERFORMANCE.html

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