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Matthew Saxton ended his post on the thread of obsolescence with:<br>
<br>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="3"><span
style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;" lang="EN-GB">But how did
we get on to this? Oh yes: Robin Campbell
diverted us from my original question about the competence-performance
distinction. On which, I’ve had some very helpful and interesting
replies
and will, of course, post a summary.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
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<br>
And this diversion was of course very natural.<br>
<br>
I had the following experience, which I doubt is unique:<br>
<br>
At a conference on pronouns a few years ago, I gave a talk on case
errors in the first-language acquisition of English, things like "my"
and "me" for subject "I".<br>
Many people have written on this topic (including Tom Roeper, who has
been actively contributing to this thread).<br>
My talk was a formal analysis using Optimality Theory and showing that
some (but not all) of the main effects that have been reported can in
fact be accounted for in a phonological fashion.<br>
During the question period, a prominent syntactician (who I won't name
here) remarked that the data that I was addressing (which shows
variability between adult-like and non-adult-like outputs) clearly had
more to do with performance, and why would a linguist be interested in
analysing such data using the mechanisms of linguistic theory?<br>
<br>
My answer was that, assuming that performance is based on competence,
we expect performance to reflect many aspects of competence. An
argument put forward by Vicky Fromkin in her work on speech errors.<br>
<br>
There was a paper in Linguistic Inquiry in the late 1990's asserting
that all of child phonology (or at least, the ways in which their
pronunciations deviate from those of adults) is performance, that it
can tell us nothing interesting about competence, and that it is in
principle a mistake to apply linguistic theories to it. In a discussion
on the OT list, the authors compared the interest level of child
phonology to the results of an adult trying to speak with a mouthful of
peanut butter. They had no explanation for why so many papers through
the years have shown that linguistic theories can be productively
applied to such data --- but they didn't find it an interesting
observation.<br>
<br>
Back to the pronoun conference. There was a talk that addressed
pronouns in a language for which the last speaker died many years ago,
on the basis of historical documents and linguistic field research from
100 years ago. I heard comments that you can't really learn anything
from that sort of research, because you can't get confirmation of the
patterns with the grammaticality judgments of a native speaker. So,
only certain methodologies are interesting. But there's no need to
demonstrate that empirically.<br>
<br>
And these things highlight another aspect of Chomsky's legacy: a
distinction between competence and performance that leaves the actual
relationship between the two mysterious and vague, but which has been
used to restrict the range of legitimate inquiry, with strong feelings
that the issues should not be addressed empirically.<br>
A setting of boundaries, without strong justification, about what sorts
of questions should not be asked, about what sorts of research should
not be done.<br>
And this aspect of his legacy has led to a lot of dissatisfaction with
his work.<br>
It's a part of his legacy that must ultimately be addressed: the
negatives along with the many positives.<br>
To what extent would we have made faster progress if this position had
not been so widespread?<br>
<br>
Is the competence-performance distinction obsolete?<br>
It isn't clear that it was ever laid out with enough clarity to ever be
of interest.<br>
Which means, I guess, that, no, it's not obsolete. It was probably
never relevant. <br>
<br>
<br>
---Joe Stemberger<br>
Linguistics<br>
UBC<br>
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