Page 14 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Linguistics

Notes Competence is, then, an underlying mental system, it underlies actual behaviour, linguistic ability
to analyse language, detecting ambiguities, ignoring mistakes, understanding new sentences,
producing entirely new sentences. Whereas competence is a set of Principles which a speaker
masters, performance is what a speaker does. The former is a kind of code, the latter is an act of
encoding or decoding. Competence concerns the kind of structures the person has succeeded in
mastering and internalizing, whether or not he utilizes them, in practice, without interference
from many of the factors that play a role in actual behaviour. “For any one concerned with
intellectual processes, or with any question that goes beyond mere date arranging, it is the question
of competence that is fundamental. Obviously one can find out about competence only by studying
performance; but this study must be carried out in devious and clever ways, if any serious result
is to be obtained.” In this way, the abstract, internal grammar which enables a speaker to utter and
understand an infinite number of potential utterances is a speaker’s competence.
This competence is free from the interference of memory span, characteristic errors, lapses of
attention, etc. “The speaker has represented in his brain a grammar that gives an ideal account of
the structure of the sentences of his language, but, when actually faced with the task of speaking
or understanding many other factors, acts upon his underlying linguistic competence to produce
actual performance. He may be confused or have several things in mind, change his plans in
midstream, etc. Since this is obviously the condition of most actual linguistic performance, a direct
record—an actual corpus—is almost useless as it stands, for linguistic analysis of any but the most
superficial kind.”
Competence in any sphere can be identified with capacity or ability, as opposed to actual
performance. Competence in linguistics is the ‘linguistic ability—the ability to produce and
understand indefinitely many novel sentences; it refers to the native speaker’s innate creativity
and productivity implicit in the normal use of language.
This distinction has caused a lot of argument in current-day linguistics. Some socio-linguists
regard it as an unreal distinction which ignores the importance of studying language in its social
setting. They say that many of today’s grammars are based on unjustified assumptions concerning
a speaker’s competence rather on his performance. But the division is a useful one, if not carried
to extremes. In an ideal situation, the two approaches should complement each other. Any statement
concerning a speaker’s competence must ultimately be based on data collected while studying his
performance.
Although Chomsky’s competence/performance dichotomy closely resembles Saussure’s langue/
parole, yet the main difference is that Saussure stressed the sociological implications of langue,
while Chomsky stresses the psychological implications of competence. These distinctions are also
parallel to a distinction made between code and message in communications engineering. A code
is the pre-arranged signalling system. A message is an actual message sent through that system.
1.4.4 Substance and Form
Language symbols are Janus-like, they face two ways. In the Saussurean terminology, they have
an external facet, the ‘significant,’ and a semantic facet, the ‘signific’ This fundamental duality has
been called by some linguists ‘form’ and ‘meaning’—or ‘expression’ and ‘content’.
When a carpenter tries to make a table or chair out of wood, he is trying to change raw material
into finished goods. In other words, he is trying to change substance into form. Thus wood is the
substance, and furniture the form. Similarly cotton is the substance, cloth the form. Likewise in
language we have both substances and form. All distinct sounds produced by human speech
organs and scripts produced by human hands to communicate are substances of human language.
The oral substance is called the phonic substance and the visual substance is known as the
graphic substance. It is with these substances that we form languages.—The organization of
language is its form which is grammar + lexis.

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