Question: Discuss Noam Chomskys contribution to Linguist.
Or, Discuss competence performance.
Avram Noam Chomsky’s contribution to Linguist
Avram Noam Chomsky, who is an American linguist and philosopher is considered to be the father of modern linguistics particularly for his Transformational Generative Grammar and as he is one of the major figures of analytic philosophy. He introduced the terms “Competence and Performance” in his elaboration of generative grammar.
Competence: Competence is a knowledge of the system of language. This includes a person’s ability to create and understand sentences. In other words, competence means the system of linguistics knowledge of mother tongue.
According to Chomsky, competence is the ideal language system that enables speakers to produce and understand sentences in their mother tongue and to differentiate between grammatical sentences and ungrammatical sentences. This is unaffected by ‘grammatically irrelevant conditions such as speech errors.
Performance: Performance is the actual use of the language in speaking and writing. A learner’s performance in a language is an indirect indication of his or her competence.
More Notes of Linguistics
Competence verses performance:
- In competence, errors happen because of lack of knowledge. On the other hand, in performance, errors happen due to lack of attention, excitement and nervousness. We can cite two examples to make the idea clear:
- I byued a new book yesterday. Here in this sentence the under- line error is the result of lack of competence.
- I will see you yesterday. Here in this sentence, the speaker means to say “I will see you tomorrow” but instead of tomorrow he has said yesterday. This kind of mistake is called slip of the tongue that is a mistake of performance.
- Competence is considered to be ideally psychological or mental property but performance stands for an actual event. For example: when a language learner is aware of the grammatical rule for the 3rd person singular number in English, yet utters the following sentence, “He run fast”. Here in this sentence we get competence but lack of performance because the pronunciation of the sentence should be “He runs fast”.
- Competence is universal but performance is individual.
Conclusion: Competence and performance cannot be set apart instead of having some conspicuous distinctions between them.
