Language Competence.docx 521b1w

Language Competence What is language competence? This is a question that many linguists have been trying to answer for years. Chomsky was the first one who attempted to provide an accurate definition of language competence. He made a distinction between two very well-known : ‘competence’ and ‘performance.’ By competence, Chomsky meant the shared knowledge of the ideal speaker-listener set in a completely homogeneous speech community. This knowledge enables a of a language to produce and understand an infinite set of sentences out of a finite set of rules. Performance, on the other hand, is concerned with the process of applying the underlying knowledge to the actual language use. Now, there is no doubt that what Chomsky called competence is what we claim to be linguistic competence nowadays, a person’s internalized grammar of a language, i.e. a person’s ability to create and understand sentences, including sentences they have never heard before, and a person’s knowledge of what are and what are not sentences of a particular language. However, grammatical knowledge is not enough to help us participate effectively in a communicative situation. So Chomsky’s attempt to define language competence is not so accurate.

What is Language Competence? Four Components of Language Competence 

Grammatical Competence

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Discourse Competence

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Sociolinguistic Competence

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Strategic Competence

What is Language Competence

information about what it means to be competent in a second language The meaning of your language competence depends on your reasons for developing it. Are you mainly interested in speaking proficiency, foreign language literacy, cross-cultural awareness, or knowledge about language? Is language ability an end to itself, or a means to another end, such as graduate study, study abroad, preparation for field work or professional practice? There are many ways to define language ability and to learn and teach languages. Most language teachers try to include some work in each of the areas listed. When you sign up for a language course, it worthwhile for you to reflect on your personal reasons for language study, and communicate these to your teachers so that they will know what matters most to you. When experts define language competence, they try to be as precise and inclusive as possible in coping with a very complicated phenomenon. In this section, we will explore how language is defined by scholars and professionals in language-related areas such as linguistics, language teaching and anthropology. One of the best known models of language ability is known as "Communicative Competence." This model was developed to for the kinds of knowledge people need in order to uselanguage in meaningful interaction. The term was originally coined by anthropologist Dell

Hymes as a means of describing the knowledge language s need in addition to the grammatical forms of the language. The term was then adopted by the language teaching community after it had been developed into a model for that field by Michael Canale and Merrill Swain (1980), then by Sandra Savignon (1997). In the version commonly used by language teachers, the model includes four components: Grammatical Competence

is the ability to use the forms of the language (sounds, words, and sentence structure). Grammatical competence is the primary focus of study in most academic language courses. Most scholars agree that there is some kind of fundamental difference between being able to use the forms of the language and being able to talk about the forms of the language: the relationship between those two kinds of knowledge is a controversial topic! Let's look at an example of how grammatical competence works: Which of the following "sentences" is grammatically correct? Discourse Competence

is the ability to understand and create forms of the language that are longer than sentences, such as stories, conversations, or business letters. Discourse competence includes understanding how particular instances of language use are internally constructed. For example, consider the following text: The Space Cadets ate the rocketship. It was delicious! In this text, what is the meaning of the word "it"? You can figure out that "it" refers to the rocketship previously mentioned because you have discourse competence in English that allows you to identify the referents of pronouns. (I am going to add discourse cohesion exercises:1) scrambled sentences, 2) drawing links between textual elements a la Halliday and Hasan) Discourse competence also includes understanding how texts relate to the context or situation in which they are used. For example, what is the meaning of the word "in" in the following sentence (Examples are inspired by Scollon and Scollon 1995): The car is in the driveway. The pencil is in the cup. Because we have practical knowledge that completes our understand of language use, we know that the pencil is surrounded by the cup, but that the car is (probably) not embedded in the driveway! Now consider the following text: The party was a blast! After Melvin opened his presents and everyone played with his new Star Wars light saber, it was time to eat. Melvin blew out the candles and the Space Cadets ate the rocketship. It was delicious! Served with real astronaut ice cream. Melvin's parents really knocked themselves out this time. Now can you see how the sentence "The Space Cadets ate the rocketship." could be correct? What else do you have to know in order to understand this text? Who is writing? How old are the people described? What kind of event is described? You can interpret the sentence because you perceive its coherence in the context of American cultural practices for children's birthday celebrations. What makes a text coherent often has less to do with sentence structure than with text structure and out knowledge of the world. Consider the following examples: #1) The theoretical discussions are excellent. Brew in any coffee maker. If you have questions

about your symptoms call First Help. Sam wants to know what twelve o'clock means. Miss Honey and her boyfriend Bruno called to take the children for a picnic in the park. Where can you buy this convenient flashlight? #2) Phillip's Chicken Pie. Delicious and ready in two minutes! Three tantalizing varieties available with your choice of noodles, mashed potatoes or our special mushroom gravy. Complete on-the-go meals for the busy gourmet! Which one of these stretches of language forms a coherent whole? What kind of text is it? Text #2 is more coherent than Text #1. It belongs to a genre of language use we recognize as advertising. Which example is made up of complete sentences? Text #1 is not really a text at all! It is a series of sentences strung together after they were taken from their original context (a linguistics book jacket, a coffee can, a flier from an HMO, a conversation, a children's book and a magazine ad). Different cultures have different expectations for text forms and devices for making texts fit together, and different ways of defining situations that allow people to understand what is being communicated. Sociolinguistic Competence

is the ability to use language appropriately in different contexts. Sociolinguistic competence overlaps significantly with discourse competence because it has to do with expressing, interpreting and negotiating meaning according to culturally-derived norms and expectations. Sociolinguistic competence is most obvious to us when the conventions governing language use are somehow violated, as for example when a child innocently uses a "bad" word or when the expectations present in one culture are unsuccessfully translated for another. It is our sociolinguistic competence that allows us to be polite according to the situation we are in and to be able to infer the intentions of others. In our everyday life we vary the kind of language we use according to levels of formality and familiarity. We express solidarity in groups to which we belong or wish to belong, for example in classroom chat with other students, or at a party. In situations where we may eventually have solidairty with the others present, but do not yet know them well, we express deference, for example at an international meeting of scholars in the same field. In situations where there is an obvious status difference between participants, we are careful to express the right amount of respect. Take this quick test of your sociolinguistic competence in American English. Which response would be the most correct according to the situation? Strategic Competence

is the ability to compensate for lack of ability in any of the other areas. What do you do when you don't know a word that you need? How do you manage a social situation when you aren't quite sure about the rules of etiquette? In both cases, you rely on your strategic competence to help you communicate. Everyone has some degree of strategic competence in any language. If you are hungry, but cannot speak the language, you can probably still make your need known through gesture and facial expression because hunger is a universal fact of human life. Language learners who really need to communicate in their adopted language tend to develop a number of strategies for making themselves clear in spite of their incomplete knowledge.

Let us suppose that you are visiting Hungary and suddenly realize that you need to buy some dental floss. You speak some elementary Hungarian but you don't know how to say "dental floss." Having located a likely place to make your purchase, you approach the clerk. Now what? You can use gesture to convey your message. You can coin a word, perhaps "teethstring." You can use circumlocution: "I would like to buy thing for cleaning mouth parts. Inside. Please." If you can't get your message across, you can give up! Maybe your need for dental floss was not so urgent after all. Now let's look at another example. An advanced American learner of French must write some business letters to arrange for hotel accommodations for a study group. She knows that French business letters involve a complex set of politeness rules that date from the classical era, and she knows that many French people are ambivalent about those rules because they are so complicated. There are over 35 different ways to sign off, involving language like: Veuillez agreer l'expression de mes sentiments les plus distingues. Please acknowledge the expression of my most respectful sentiments. or Je vous prie, Cher Monsieur, de croire a l'expression de mes sentiments distingues. I beg you, dear Sir, to believe in the expression of my most respectful sentiments. The American learner simply doesn't know which one of the 35 possibilities applies to her situation, and the whole idea of writing like that makes her feel ill at ease. What should she do? One possibility is to do the research and find out which formula best suits her needs. Another is to decide that it is better, in her case, to be honest andto appear sincere- than to be correct. She could write: Je vous prierais de croire a quelque chose si je connaissais mieux les regles du bon usage en , mais pour l'instant je ne peux que vous remercier sincerement de votre aide. I would beg you to believe in somehing if I were better acquainted with the rules of usage in your country, but for now I can only thank you very sincerely for your help. Here are some additional facts about communicative competence: We do not know the relative contributions of each feature of communicative competence. Communicative competence is domain-specific. Communicative effectiveness is not the same thing as grammatical competence.

Linguistic competence is the system of linguistic knowledge possessed by native speakers of a language, it is in contrast to the concept of Linguistic performance, the way the language system is used in communication. The concept was first introduced by Noam Chomsky as part of the foundations for his Generative grammar, but it has since been adopted and developed by other linguists, particularly those working in the generativist tradition. In the generativist tradition competence is the only level of language that is studied, because this level gives insights into the Universal Grammar, that generativists see as underlying all human language systems. Functional theories of grammar tend to dismiss the sharp distinction between competence and performance, and particularly the primacy given to the study of competence.

According to Chomsky, competence is the 'ideal' language system that makes it possible for speakers to produce and understand an infinite number of sentences in their language, and to distinguish grammatical sentences from ungrammatical sentences. This is unaffected by "grammatically irrelevant conditions" such as speech errors. "Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-communication, who know its (the speech community's) language perfectly and that it is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of this language in actual performance." ~Chomsky,196 Chomsky differentiates competence, which is an idealized capacity, from performance being the production of actual utterances. According to him, competence is the ideal speakerhearer's knowledge of his or her language and it is the 'mental reality' which is responsible for all those aspects of language use which can be characterized as 'linguistic'. Chomsky argues that only under an idealized situation whereby the speaker-hearer is unaffected by grammatically irrelevant conditions such as memory limitations and distractions will performance be a direct reflection of competence. A sample of natural speech consisting of numerous false starts and other deviations will not provide such data. Therefore, he claims that a fundamental distinction has to be made between the competence and performance. Chomsky dismissed criticisms of delimiting the study of performance in favor of the study of underlying competence, as unwarranted and completely misdirected. He claims that the descriptivist limitation-in-principle to classification and organization of data, the "extracting patterns" from a corpus of observed speech and the describing "speech habits" etc. are the core factors that precludes the development of a theory of actual performance.

One's competence is defined by the grammar, or set of language rules, that is represented mentally and manifested based on his or her own understanding of acceptable usage in a given linguistic idiom. Therefore, grammatical competence defines an innate knowledge of rules rather than knowledge of items or relations. According to Chomsky, it is regarded to be innate because one does not have to be trained to develop it and will still be able to apply it in an infinite number of unheard examples. The core components of the grammar are included in the speaker's linguistic competence and these components corresponds to five of the major subfields of linguistics:  

Phonetics: The physical production and perception of the inventory of sounds used in producing language. Phonology: The mental organization of physical sounds and the patterns formed by the way sounds are combined in a language, and the restrictions on permissible sound combinations. E.g.: slip vs *slib and *sbill 

Morphology: The identification, analysis and description of units of meaning in a language. One will know the inflectional and derivational morphology present in the language, such as the affixes of words. E.g.: re-cuddle can be derived but not *re-rich

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Syntax: The structure and formation of sentences. One can distinguish between grammatical sentences and ungrammatical sentences.

E.g.: My hair needs washing is acceptable but not *My hair needs wash 

Semantics: Understanding the meaning of sentences. This is also how a of the language is able to understand and interpret the non-literal meaning in a given utterance. They are three distinctions drawn here:

(i) Meaningful and non-meaningful sentences E.g.: The accident was seen by thousands is meaningful but not *The accident was looked by thousands (ii) Same structure but different meanings E.g.: The cow was found by the stream but not *The cow was found by the farmer (iii) Different structures and still be able to relate the meanings E.g.: The police examined the bullet. The bullet was examined by the police.

Linguistic Competence defines the system of rules that governs an individual’s tacit understanding of what is acceptable and what is not in the language they speak. The concept, introduced by the linguist Noam Chomsky in 1965, was intended to address certain assumptions about language, especially in structuralist linguistics, where the idea of an unconscious system had been extensively elaborated and schematized. Competence can be regarded as a revision of the idea of the language system. The empirical and formal realization of competence would be performance, which thus corresponds to diverse structuralist notions of parole, utterance, event, process, etc. Chomsky argues that the unconscious system of linguistic relations, which Ferdinand de Saussure named langue, is often mistakenly associated with knowledge or ability (or know-how). Chomsky is concerned to establish a science that would study what he calls “the language faculty”, in analogy with other mental faculties like logic, which as a kind of intuitive reasoning power requires no accumulation of facts or skills in order to develop. Grammatical knowledge too seems to be present and fully functional in speakers fluent in any language. So competence in Chomsky’s sense implies neither an accumulated store of knowledge nor an ability or skill. He rejects Saussure’s langue as “merely a systematic inventory of items”, and instead returns to a rationalist model of underlying competence regarded as “a system of generative processes” (4). This has the advantage of explaining plausibly events of linguistic innovation in unpredictable situations, as well as pertinence of expression and understanding in particular contexts. This faculty seems to be absent in animals and (so far) in machines that can nonetheless be taught or programmed to use signs in imitative or predetermined ways.

A key source for Chomsky’s conception is Rene Descartes, whose concern with the creative powers of the mind leads him to regard human language as an instrument of thought. Chomsky also cites Wilhelm von Humboldt as a source for the conception of the generative nature of competence. Humboldt argues that use of language is based upon the demands that thinking imposes on language, and that this is where the general laws governing language originate. In order to understand the instrument or the faculty itself, however, it would not be necessary or even desirable to consider the creative abilities of great writers or the cultural wealth of nations; the linguist would, rather, attempt to abstract the generative rules, which remain unchanged from individual to individual. Competence, in Chomsky’s sense, is to be regarded as entirely independent of any considerations of performance, which might concern other disciplines, like pragmatics, psychology, medicine, or literary theory. An individual’s competence is defined by the grammar, or set of rules, that is represented mentally and manifested by their understanding of acceptable usage in a given linguistic idiom. Grammatical competence thus defines an innate knowledge of rules rather than knowledge of items or relations. It is said to be innate because one apparently does not have to be trained to acquire it and it can be applied to an unlimited number of previously unheard examples. The two phrases I speak acceptable Chinese and I speak Chinese acceptably would be regarded as acceptable by any native English speaker, but I speak acceptably Chinese would probably not. Despite this, the more complex form, I speak quite acceptably Cantonese and some other Chinese dialects as well as Japanese, might be regarded as alright. Examples like these are thought to provide evidence of a deep structure of grammar, in other words, a linguistic competence.

A project in generative grammar has two distinct aims. First, it is a matter of analyzing the elements of a sentence or phrase into its distinct parts, thus revealing the so called deep structure of the sentence. Competence thus implies an unconscious knowledge of the rules for converting deep structure into surface structure. The procedures have been adopted by or incorporated into several approaches to text and discourse analysis. The relationship between surface structure and deep structure can be easily demonstrated, for instance, by examples of structural ambiguity, a key source of jokes, like Groucho Marx’s line from Animal Crackers: One morning I shot an elephant in my pyjamas; how he got into my pyjamas I’ll never know. The comic aspect of the punch line lies in its revealing the fact that the surface structure of the main sentence expresses two possible grammatical sentences: in my pyjamas I shot an elephant; and I shot an elephant who was wearing my pyjamas. The discrete unit in my pyjamas each time plays a different grammatical role in the deep structure of the sentence. The second, more controversial, aim of generative grammar is to establish and produce descriptive models of the rules that compose the complete grammar. The rules must be finite yet must be capable of generating an infinite number of innovative sentences. This aspect of grammar is open to debate and misunderstanding partly because of the intuitive nature of an

individual’s sense of what is and is not acceptable. Projects in generative grammar abound with examples of sentences that lie on the boundaries of what speakers might regard as acceptable, revealing fine degrees of unacceptability as well as acceptability. The point is not to establish what is right or wrong in any absolute sense. Rather it is to establish first that a speaker’s competence leads them to intuitive judgments concerning the relative acceptability of sentences; and then it is a matter of producing models of that competence. So the controversial aspect of generative grammar lies in its assertion of an innate cognitive faculty, from which issues the rules of grammatical structure and generation, and which thus describes the entire grammar of the language faculty, its syntax, which is manifested by an individual’s competence in their language. Despite the ideal implied by the notion of a complete grammar, Chomsky insists that any science of the language faculty must, like all science, be subject to interminable revision and refinement. Diverse approaches in literary criticism and critical theory address both the productive potential and the problematic character of the notion of competence. Michel Riffaterre’s response in 1966 to the exhaustive structuralist reading of Baudelaire’s “Les Chats,” by Claude Levi-Strauss and Roman Jakobson, accuses them of building a “supertext”, based on the collation and classification of regularities, which no ordinary reader could have arrived at independently of structuralist resources. In a gesture that parallels Chomsky’s response to Saussure, Riffaterre constructs instead the theoretical fiction of the “superreader”, a notion designed to establish those moments in a literary text that invariably draw the attention of the reader because of their unpredictability in the face of normative grammatical restrictions. Such moments invariably “hold up” the reading process. The idea of the superreader is to be established independently of any consideration of external conditions on individual readers, the effects on understanding of continual evolution of the language, and changes in poetic or aesthetic conventions. In later work, Riffaterre builds a sophisticated stylistic method that, again, parallels generative, or transformational, grammar. He argues that a literary text can by analyzed for the way it has been generated from what he calls its matrix, a “kernel word” or “minimal sentence”. The matrix allows the generation of forms more complex than itself, creating two levels: the generator (corresponding to the minimal deep structure of the work); and the transform (corresponding to the increasingly complex surface structure). Fascinating as the results of Riffaterre’s readings are, critics have discovered numerous problems with them. The texts he chooses for analysis, for instance, tend to be unpredictable in consistent ways, like Lauréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror. So while his analyses of texts like this are revealing, critics have been skeptical about his claims for a science of the literary in general, because many texts commonly regarded as literary can be regarded as grammatically normative yet effective in other ways. Jonathan Culler, in his Structuralist Poetics, moves away from the idea of the underlying competence of literary works, and considers instead the literary competence of readers. Culler argues that this literary competence, regarded as a kind of grammar of literature, is acquired in education institutions. In his later work, On Deconstruction, he develops the idea further, drawing on diverse critical responses to institutions, and questioning the foundations of a literary competence that surreptitiously promotes the doctrines and values of specific traditions.

Literary analysis has also been responsible for effective critical engagements with the implications of Chomsky’s concept of competence. Colin MacCabe’s essay on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, “Competence and Performance: the Body and Language in Finnegans Wake,” takes issue with the biological grounds of Chomsky’s theoretical formulations, arguing that Finnegans Wake literally “dis” any normative conception of the relation between the body and language. MacCabe argues that more weight must be given to the institutional forms of education and entertainment in the formation of tacit competence as a source of political force. He insists that in order to build on Chomsky’s studies of competence a concept of discourse is required. The concept of discourse would help bring Chomsky’s theoretical formulations closer to those of Michel Foucault, to whom he is often opposed. Foucault, for instance, in The Archeology of Knowledge adapts the notion of archive to for those rules that govern what we know and what we can say, but which we cannot, for that reason, ever describe. These rules function not as part of an innate system, as Chomsky contends, but as a “system of accumulation, historicity, and disappearance” (Archaeology 130). The archive thus designates what Foucault calls the “historical a priori”, historical conditions independent of experience that nonetheless help to determine it. Several other theorists have comparable formulations, where the always apparently innate laws that conspire to form competences of certain kinds turn out to have been overdetermined by institutions or other systems of organization. In these cases there are not only linguistic and literary competences but also competences of love, of sexuality, of urban dwelling and so on. Jacques Lacan’s concept of the Other, as “the locus of the word”, functions just as Chomsky’s concept of the fluent speaker does, with the essential difference that Lacan’s Other is the locus also of the Symbolic and thus represents institutional normalization. A further celebrated intervention would be Roland Barthes’s formulation, in S/Z, of the codes that he argues govern the realist text. Barthes exposes a tacit understanding that disguises a highly sophisticated and multivalent matrix of assumptions and expectations. A J Greimas, in a discussion of the semiotics of amorous performance, after observing that “every performance presupposes competence”, tells a humorous anecdote that gestures to what is at stake: I during one of Jakobson’s visits to Paris, the question was strongly debated between Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss and Lacan whether, if two young people had been raised following the precepts of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “naturally”, without knowing the laws of love, could they or could they not exercise amorous doing? … I recall that Lévi-Strauss was categorical in saying, “No, they cannot make love”, where Jakobson sided with nature (357). This reported debate between Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss is suggestive of what is at stake in the concept of competence. To side with nature is to side with arguments that define the human in of universal capacities. Such capacities, these arguments claim, give rise to wide variations in performance (i.e., languages, cultures, individuals, etc.). To oppose this view is to side with arguments that claim for human experience an unconscious, a priori, establishment of institutions, laws, histories etc. In the absence of a model, so far, for an innate universal grammar, one might suppose that a capacity exists that contingently gives the

speaker access to whatever syntax or other kind of competence might be required by environmental needs. Then it would follow as a matter of course that competence no less than performance would always be institutional in some way.

Linguistic competence is a term used by speech experts and anthropologists to describe how language is defined within a community of speakers. This term applies to mastering the combination of sounds, syntax and semantics known as the grammar of a language. People with such competence have learned to utilize the grammar of their spoken language to generate an unlimited amount of statements. This term is distinct from the concept of communicative competence, which determines what is socially appropriate speech. The idea of linguistic competence was first developed by linguist Noam Chomsky in the mid-1960s. Chomsky developed several theories aimed at describing how language was acquired and functioned within a culture. Linguistic competence is part of a larger theory of linguistic behavior known as universal grammar, which explains language as a natural ability with which children are born and which becomes refined as they develop. This theory lies in contrast with the idea that speech is strictly a learned behavior. Chomsky’s theory of generative grammar contained several key concepts about language, including linguistic competence, linguistic performance and communicative competence. Chomsky defined linguistic competence as an idealized understanding of the rules and construction of a given language. This includes the distinct sounds used in the language, the combination of these sounds, the creation of sentences and the interpretation of a sentence. Once a speaker masters this set of rules, he or she can use this grammar to produce new phrases that will be understood by all speakers of the same language. Linguistic performance and communicative competence are concepts related to linguistic competence but are applied to language as it is actually used rather than as an ideal construct. Linguistic performance is the practical application of speech with the grammatical flaws and mistakes that exist among real-world speakers. This allows speakers to understand each other despite grammatical flaws and differences in dialect. Communicative competence refers to the rules that govern the kinds of speech allowed within the cultural context. Chomsky’s theories sparked debate among linguists and have continued to influence debate around the acquisition and use of language. Some linguistic theorists see linguistic competence as a learned behavior rather than an innate function of the human brain. Other researchers ignore Chomsky’s separate definitions of competence and performance and study language as a practical function of human behavior. The concept of linguistic competence remains an important aspect of linguistic theory and education. It is a subject touched on by linguistics courses within the English curriculum and is dealt with in depth in linguistic and cultural anthropology. Linguistic researchers and theorists continue to study and refine this concept through fieldwork and clinical investigation.