Chomsky vs. Hymes: Linguistic and Communicative Competence

[John McCreery]

The following message continues a thread that began on Anthro-L, I am
cross-posting it to linganth and Easianth in hopes of hearing experts put me
in my place.

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I was hoping that Ron Kephart would get back to us on on Dell Hymes
assertion that Chomsky's methodological statement that,

"Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in
a completely homogeneous speech community, who knows its language perfectly
and is unaffected by such grammatically irelevant conditions as memory
limitations, distractions, s hifts of attention and interest, and errors
(random or characteristic) in applying his knowldge of the language n actual
performance"

is, turning to Hymes now, is "almost a declaration of irrelevance" in
relation to "the standpoint of the children we seek to understand and help."

Noting the claim that Chomsky is making an analytic distinction, or, more
precisely, constructing an idealized, counterfactual model for theoretical
purposes (in itself no bad thing since, for example, physicists, with their
"point masses" and "ideal gases," and economists, with their "free markets"
do it productively all the time), what can we say by way of demonstrating
that what Hymes describes as "almost [sic] a declaration of irrelevance" is
not, in fact, absolutely so?

In hopes of stirring up Ron, I will play the devils advocate and answer,
"Not much." I will go further and argue that Chomsky's statement yields
insoluble dilemmas in practical applications.

The difficulty, as I perceive it, is that Chomsky's ideal speaker-listener
can only be defined in relation to an ideal speech community, all of whose
members learn the same language--where "same" means conforming to identical
grammatical rules. Grammatical statements conform to those rules;
non-grammatical ones do not, and this ideal speech community's members are
all precisely equal in where they draw the line.

But the model is counterfactual because, in brute fact, no such speech
community does or can exist. In every actual human speech community there
is, minimally, a difference between adults and children, fully mature and
immature speakers. Even if the former are all perfectly competent speakers
of the speech community's language (itself a stretch in any real-world
situation), the latter are not. At this basic level there are always some
speakers who speak better than others.

In most human communities, moreover, there are roles reserved for
individuals with unusual types or degrees of what Hymes labels
"communicative competence." Insofar as they take particular responsibility
for that communicative competence, their speech becomes what Richard Bauman
labels "performance."

The Chomskian may now object that, as Hymes and Bauman conceive it,
"communicative competence" is a much more inclusive category than
"linguistic competence" as Chomsky conceives it. The rhetorical skills that
distinguish the actor, orator, poet, shaman, etc., are something else, over
and above the shared grammatical rules to which Chomsky restricts linguistic
analysis.

To which the linguistic anthropologist comes back, "How, pray tell, do you
tell the difference?" The answer will almost certainly be an appeal to
certain technical operations, the use of minimal pairs, complementary
distribution, etc., to isolate differences between utterances that
informants representative of the speech community in question will agree are
either grammatical or not. But what if they disagree? Such disagreements do
happen. They are, in fact, the very stuff of which all debates over the
linguistic propriety of this or that utterance are constituted. How does one
tell that one side of the debate has it right without arbitrarily excluding
those who have it wrong from the speech community in question? Or,
alternatively, allowing for degrees of competence, which undermines the
assumption that all members of the speech community are, ipso facto, equally
competent?

Can't be done, I'd say. But, then, I am no linguist.

Awaiting enlightenment,



John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd.
Tel +81-45-314-9324
Fax +81-45-316-4409
email mccreery at gol.com

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