محاضرات الدكتور جورجPerformance and Competence:

Performance and Competence:

Dictionary Definition:
(1) the condition of being capable (2) ability " (3) sufficient income to live on :
Linguistic Definition of Competence:
A term used in LINGUISTIC theory, and especially in Generative Grammar, to refer to a person's knowledge of his 1anguage, the SYSTEM of Rules which he has mastered so that he is able to produce and understand an indefinite number of SENTENCES, and to recognize grammatical mistakes and AMBIGUITIES. It is an idealized conception of language, which is seen in opposition to the notion of PERFORMANCE, the specific UTTERANCES of speech

Performance:
Dictionary Definition:
(1) the act, process, or art perfuming (2) an artistic or dramatic production (3) mode of conduct or behavior

Linguistic Definition of Performance:
A term used in LINGUISTIC theory, and especially in GENERATIVE GRAMMAR, to refer to LANGUAGE seen as a set of specific UTTERANCES produced by NATIVE SPEAKERS. It is opposed, in this sense, to the idealized conception of language known as COMPETENCE. The utterances of performance will contain features irrelevant to the abstract RULE system, such as hesitation and unfinished structures, arising from difficulties acting up biological limitations such as PAUSE being introduced, through the need to breathe these features must be discounted in a grammar of the languages, which deals with the systematic processes of SENTENCE construction. The possible implication of this view, performance features are unimportant has been strongly criticized.

Avram Naam Chomsky (Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) developed the conception of a generative grammar, which departed radically from the structuralism and behaviorism of the previous decades. Earlier analyses of sentences were shown to be inadequate in various respects, mainly because they failed to take into account the difference between 'surface' and 'deep' levels of grammatical structure. Al a surface level a sentence as John is eager to please and John is easy to please can be analyzed in an identical way~ but front the point of 'view of their underlying meaning, the two sentences diverge: in the first, John wants to please someone else~ in the second, someone else is involved in pleasing John. A major aim of generative grammar was to provide a means of analyzing sentences that took account of this underlying level structure.

To achieve this aim, Chomsky drew a fundamental distinction (similar to Saussure's langue and parole) between the person's knowledge of the rules of the language and the actual use of that language in real situations. The first he referred to as competence; and the second as performance.
Linguistics, he argued, should be concerned with the study of competence, and not restrict itself to performance - something that was characteristic of previous linguistic studies in their reliance on samples (or 'corpora') of speech (e.g. in the form of a collection of tape recordings). Such samples were inadequate because they could provide only a tiny fraction of the sentences

it is possible to as_ 'non-fluencies, change~ Speakers use their competence of any corpus, by bei sentences, and to identir:.of the rules governing the more important goal

ey also contained m _ their errors of performance.
far beyond the limitations ....reate and recognize novel nee errors. The description 'e of this competence was thus

Chomsky's proposals ,yere intended to discover the mental realities underlying the 'way people use language: competence is seen 'as an aspect of our general psychological capacity.
Linguistics was thus envisaged as a mentalistic discipline - a view that contrasted with the behavioural bias of previous work in the subject. It was also argued that linguistics should not simply limit itself to the description of competence. In the long term, there was still more powerful target: to provide a grammar capable of evaluating the adequacy of different accounts of competence, and of going beyond the study of individual languages to the nature of human language as a whole h, dicovering (linguistic universals '. In this way, it is hope linguistics would be able to make a contribution to [) understanding of the nature of the human mind.

The essence of this approach is to provide an answer to the question 'How comes it that human beings, whose contacts with the world are brief and personal and limited, are nevertheless able to know as much as they do know?' By studying the human language faculty, it should be possible to show how a person constructs a knowledge system out of everyday experience, and thus move some way towards solving this problem.