Introduction to Ling ...

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.

A constituent is a group of words or morphemes with closer relationships between one another than between the elements of the other groups or constituents within the same sentence.

The deep structure (DS) is much more abstract and is considered to be in the speaker's mind. It refers to certain important generalisationsabout the structure of the sentence which are different from its surface.

 A descriptive grammar  is a set of rules based on how language is actually used.

A diachronic approach to language is the study ofthe history of a language, focussing on language change in pronunciation, grammar or vocabulary.

Generative grammar is a conceptual model whose central tenet is that language is a property for which human beings are biologically prewired.The name ‘generative grammar’ is used to refer to this model since speakers are assumed to possess a grammar capable of generating all the possible sentences in their language (while excluding all the impossible ones).

Immediate Constituent Analysis (ICA) is an explicit method of analysing sentences grammatically by dividing them into their component parts.

The Langauge Acquisition Device is an inborn capacity (a genetic mechanism or apparatus) which is present in the brain right from the beginning and which enables children (by the age of 3 to 4) to extract the rules of language from speech when they are exposed to it and to use them productively. Animals do not possess this capacity.

Langue refers to the abstract system shared by all the speakers of the same language, like English, Arabic, French, etc. It is an underlying system of abstract rules of lexicon, grammar and phonology which is implanted in each individual’s mind resulting from his nurture in a given speech community.

Linguistics or modern linguistics refers to the scientific study of language and its structure.