2. HISTORY
Noam Chomsky: An
American linguist, first
introduced the concept
of āperformanceā and
ācompetenceā as part of
the foundations for his
Generative grammar.
3. definitions
A term used in the
linguistic theory of
transformational
generative grammar,
refer to language is
seen as a set of
specific utterances
produced by native
speaker.
Personās knowledge of his
language.
ā¢ The system rules which a
language user has mastered
so that it would be possible
for that user to produce and
understand an infinite
number of sentences and
recognise grammatical
mistakes and ambiguities
COMPETENCE
PERFORMANCE
5. What is the difference between
competence and performance?
ļµ Chomsky separates competence and performance; he
describes 'competence' as an idealized capacity that is
located as a psychological or mental property or function
and āperformanceā as the production of actual
utterances.
6. What is the difference between
competence and performance?
ļµ In short, competence involves āknowingā the language
and performance involves ādoingā something with the
language. The difficulty with this construct is that it is
very difficult to assess competence without assessing
performance.
7. Why is it important to make a distinction
between competence and performance?
ļµ Noting the distinction between competence
and performance is useful primarily because
it allows those studying a language to
differentiate between a speech error and
not knowing something about the
language. To understand this distinction, it
is helpful to think about a time when you've
made some sort of error in your speech.
8. Why is it important to make a distinction
between competence and performance?
ļµ For example, let's say you are a native speaker of English and utter
the following:
ļµ We swimmed in the ocean this weekend.
ļµ Is this error due to competence
or
performance?
9. Why is it important to make a
distinction between competence and
performance?
ļµ It is most likely that as a native speaker you are aware how to
conjugate irregular verbs in the past but your performance has let you
down this time. Linguists use the distinction between competence
and performance to illustrate the intuitive difference between
accidentally saying swimmed and the fact that a child or non-
proficient
speaker of English may
not know that the past tense
of swim is swam and say
swimmed consistently.
