competence/performance

[Greg Thomson]

At 10:15 +0000 12-17-1999, Martin Haspelmath wrote:
>I'm somewhat surprised to see that Joan Bresnan dissociates herself from
>the competence/performance terminology. OK, it probably has a lot of
>baggage attached to it that I may not be aware of, but my impression is
>that we all pretty much agree that there is a necessary conceptual
>distinction between language use and language structure, or speech and
>grammar, or more generally between processing and storage, or cognitive
>events and cognitive patterns.

I believe Chomsky has used phraseology along the lines of "a disticntion
between what one knows and what one does with what one knows". For a long
time I couldn't imagine how anyone could take issue with the validity of
such a distinction. However, suppose there are comprehension mechanisms
that just sit there until they encounter speech, and at that point they
process it. Suppose also that there are other mechanisms that just sit
there until a to-be-verbalized concept gets kicked into them, and at that
point they just verbalize it. In that case, competence is the performance
systems. The only distinction to be made is a distinction between when they
are running and when they aren't running. If there is a third system in
people in addition to the comprehension and production systems--one that
specifies or characterizes the sentences of their languages and the
structural properties of those sentences--what is it for?

In answer to Tuggy's question regarding harmful Chomskyan ideas, I would
cite this idea as a damaging one. In my own area of special interest,
Second Language Acquisition, it has lots of people thinking about acquiring
grammars, rather than thinking about developing comprehension and
production mechanisms.

Greg Thomson