3. On Language (4): Competence and Performance

Noam Chomsky established a new field of linguistics based on a theory essentially worked out during the 1950s and substantially improvised later. In 1957, with publication of his book Syntactic Structures, Chomsky initiated the Theory of Transformational-generative grammar, a system that revolutionnized modern linguistics. This system of linguistics treats grammar as a theory of language. Chomsky believes that in addition to the rules of grammar specific to individual languages there are universal rules common to all languages, and this indicates that the ability to form and understand language is innate to all human beings. Such a grammar is a kind of universal grammar that underlies all the various human grammars. And the task of the linguist is to describe the universal human language ability on the basis of universal grammar. In his Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Chomsky (1965) first introduced the terms Competence and Performance within which, according to him, a person’s intuitive knowledge of the rules and structure of his own language as a native speaker is termed as competence, and his actual use of that knowledge is termed as performance.

The distinction between competence and performance, according to Chomsky, is the distinction between the innate or unconscious knowledge of one’s language, which enables him to generate all possible grammatical sentences and decide the way in which one uses the language in reality; that is, the transformation of competence into everyday speech. Competence thus refers to the speaker’s knowledge of his or her language: the system of rules which he/she has mastered so that he/she is able to produce and understand an infinite number of potential utterances and make distinction between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences, tearing apart all the ambiguities or recognizing an expression as command, request, politeness, rough order and so on. Competence, therefore, can be considered as an underlying mental system, it underlies an actual behaviour, linguistic ability in any native speaker to produce or comprehend his language. It as a whole refers to the native speaker's innate creativity and productivity implicit in the normal use of language. Performance, on the contrary, is a set of specific utterances, a real speech act with physical manifestation produced by the native speaker. It is actually an outcome of speaker’s competence. The utterance of performance may contain features irrelevant to the abstract rules such as hesitations and unfinished structures arising from the various psychological and social difficulties acting upon the speaker. Such constraints and difficulties also include lapses of memory and some biological limitations. Thus, performance is a particular language-behaviour, determined not only by the speaker’s linguistic competence, but also by a variety of nonlinguistic factors including, on the one hand, social conventions, the speaker’s emotional attitudes towards what one is saying, one’s assumption about the interlocutor’s attitudes and so on, and on the other hand, the operation of the psychological and physiological mechanisms involved in the production of utterances (Lyons 1981).

Shortly, competence is the tacit knowledge of language; performance is the use of the language in concrete situations. The speaker’s knowledge of the structure of a language is his linguistic competence and the way in which he uses it is his linguistic performance. Sentence is seen as belonging to the theory of competence, while utterance belongs to performance. In other words, competence is a kind of code; performance is an act of encoding or decoding. One can understand a speaker’s competence by studying his performance. This means performance presupposes competence, whereas competence does not presuppose performance. For a linguist to study a particular language requires to work not on the performance but on the competence of its speakers.

The notions of competence and performance postulated by Chomsky in early enterprise are somewhat similar to the dichotomy of De Saussure’s la langue and la parole. Linguistic competence is said to resemble to the notion of la langue and la parole comes closer to linguistic performance. Yet the main differences between two pairs of concept can be obviously enumerated. Lyons (1981) pointed out that De Saussure laid special emphasis on the social or institutional nature of language-systems. He proposed a langue as a system of relations but said little or nothing about the rules that are required to generate sentences. He therefore thought of linguistics as being closer to sociology and social psychology than it is to cognitive psychology. Chomsky, on the other hand, has insisted from the out set that the capacity to produce and understand syntactically well formed sentences is a central part a speaker’s linguistic competence. Chomsky stresses the psychological implications of competence. He then classifies it as a branch of cognitive psychology. Furthermore, the distinction between competence and performance as drawn by Chomsky, as pointed out by Lyons (1981), is at the very heart of generativism:

A speaker’s linguistic competence is a set of rules which he has constructed in his mind by virtue of his application of his innate capacity for language-acquisition to the language-data that he has, heard around him in childhood. The grammar that the linguist constructs for the language-system in question can be seen as a model of the native speaker’s competence. To the extent that it successfully models such properties of linguistic competence as the ability to produce and understand an indefinitely large number of sentences, it will serve as a model of one of the faculties, or organs, of the mind. To the extent that the theory of generative grammar can identify, and construct a model for, that part of linguistic competence which, being universal (and arbitrary) is held to be innate, it can be regarded as falling within the province of cognitive psychology and as making its own unique contribution to the study of man. It is, of course, this aspect of generativism, with its reinterpretation and revitalization of the traditional notion of universal grammar, which has excited the attention of psychologists and philosophers. (Lyon 1981: 233)