Key Concepts in TGG
| Site: | Plateforme pédagogique de l'Université Sétif2 |
| Course: | Introduction to Linguistics |
| Book: | Key Concepts in TGG |
| Printed by: | Visiteur anonyme |
| Date: | Saturday, 12 July 2025, 10:26 AM |
Description
The criticism of structuralism laid the basic foundations of TGG, causing modern linguistics to make a colossal footstep in the course of its development. TGG involved certain new concepts about language as a reality and about the way it should be analysed.
1. Competence and Performance
Chomsky's objection to analyses of corpora is based on the distinction that he draws between two concepts: competence and performance.
1.1. Competence
Competence refers to a person's internalised grammar (knowledge) of his language. This means a native speaker's ability to produce and understand sentences, including sentences they have never heard before. It also includes a person's knowledge of what are and what are not sentences of a particular language. So, it is the code which underlies all utterances in a given language. A speaker's linguistic competence enables him to produce only grammatical and well-pronounced sentences, and to avoid the generation of ungrammatical and mispronounced sentences, and to recognise whether sentences are synonymous, ambiguous, simple, complex, etc. For Chomsky, linguistics should be concerned with competence. The latter is purely linguistic.
This is similar to Saussure's concept of langue, but Saussure stressed the social aspect of langue (the collective shared knowledge), whereas Chomsky stressed the individual nature of competence: He sees it as a set of processes possessed by the individual and developed in him as part of his maturation. “Langue” is extracted from utterances after they were produced, but “competence” is the system which creates sentences never heard before.
1.2. Performance
Performance, on the other hand, refers to the realisation of this code in actual situations. It is the person's concrete use of language in producing and understanding sentences. Performance represents only a small sample of the utterances of language and is influenced by external non-linguistic factors such as lapses of memory, lapses of attention, malfunctioning of the mechanisms related to speech, stress, fatigue, noisy surroundings and so on. As a result, a speaker may produce false starts, changes of plan in mid-course, restructuring of what the speaker wants to say, etc.
Performance is the use of the code in actual situations. Competence is a linguistic code (set of rules)
For Chomsky, “performance” is not the object of study in linguistics (but psychology). For Saussure, however, “parole” does provide the data from which statements about “langue” can be made.