By Alicia Perez
English Major at UPNFM
Honduras
ccording to Chomsky there is a distinction between Performance and Competence, the former refers to the words we say or write; person´s ability learning a language the latter describes their tacit, intuitive knowledge about the language or languages they have mastered. Competence monitors performance to ensure that a person´s production is accurate. Performance contains slips of the tongue and false starts and represent only a small sample of possible utterances; eg: I own two-thirds of an emu, a good English sentence, but is unlikely to occur in any collected sample.
The terms were proposed by Noam CHOMSKY in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, when he stressed the need for a generative grammar that mirrors a speaker's competence and captures the creative aspect of linguistic ability. In Knowledge of Language (1986), Chomsky replaced the terms with I-language (internalized language) and E-language (externalized language. A similar dichotomy, langue and parole, was proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure (1915), who stressed the social aspects of langue, regarding it as shared knowledge, whereas Chomsky stressed the individual nature of competence).
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Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician, political commentator and activist. Sometimes described as the "father of modern linguistics".
10 Mind Explorer/ October, 2013