Competence vs. Performance: Summary

[Bruno Estigarribia]

Hello all,

Of necessity a short contribution: I am abroad (still have to read  
tom´s reference on Superiority to have an opinion on that too... does  
the day have 25 hours anywhere on the globe?)

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> As usual, we find signs of Wheel Reinvention, starting with the well  
> known >fact that competence-performance was inspired by Saussure's  
> (1916/1974) >notions of langue and parole.

Misinspired if anything, and still often misquoted. For Saussure,  
LANGUE is a social phenomenon that does not reside in the individual  
but as a set/network of conventions. He explicitly said (or his  
students, rather) that no individual possesses LANGUE. So it CANNOT be  
competence, which fully resides, in Chomskyan linguistics, in the  
brain of the individual. Competence, in my view, has little to do with  
langue. The only thing that Chomsky maintained from Saussure was that  
some dichotomy might be useful...
Bruno