Historical Development of the term (Linguistics)

Historical Development of the term (Linguistics) 1. Rhetoric (Plato) Language + Philosophy 2. Grammar (Aristotle) Language separated from philosophy 3. Comparative Philology (in Europe, eg. Franz Bopp) Comparing languages to Greek and Latin 4. Linguistics (eg. Edward Sapir) Late nineteen or early twentieth century

Important distinctions in linguistics (Dichotomies) Speech vs. writing Descriptive vs. prescriptive Synchronic vs. diachronic Langue & parole Competence and performance

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2. Descriptive vs. prescriptive Don't say X. People don't say X. The first is a prescriptive command, while the second is a descriptive statement. The distinction lies in prescribing how things ought to be and describing how things are.

The reason why present-day linguists are so insistent about the distinction between the two types of rules is simply that traditional grammar was very strongly normative in character, e.g. You should never use a double-negative; You should not split the infinitive; etc.

Humorous grammar rules Never end a sentence with a preposition. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive. No sentence fragments.

Descriptive vs. prescriptive represent two different types of linguistic study. Descriptive---to describe the fact of linguistic usage as they are, and not how they ought to be, with reference to some real or imagined ideal state. Prescriptive---a term used to characterize any approach which attempt to lay down rules of correctness as to how language should be used.

3 Synchronic vs. diachronic A synchronic description takes a fixed instant (usually, but not necessarily, the present) as its point of observation. Most grammars are of this kind. Diachronic linguistics is the study of a language through the course of its history.

Synchronic (linguistics)---languages are studied at a theoretic point in time: one describes a ‘state’ of language, disregarding whatever changes might be taking place. Diachronic----languages are studied from point of view of their historical development – for example, the changes which have taken place between Old and Modern English could be described in phonological, grammatical and semantic terms.

4 Langue & parole Saussure distinguished the linguistic competence of the speaker and the actual phenomena or data of linguistics (utterances) as langue and parole.

While parole constitutes the immediately accessible data, the linguist's proper object is the langue of each community, the lexicon, grammar, and phonology implanted in each individual by his upbringing in society and on the basis of which he speaks and understands his language.

Langue--- the language system shared by a community of speakers Parole--- the concrete act of speaking in actual situations by an individual speaker. Langue (French, meaning "language") and parole (meaning "speech") are linguistic terms used by Ferdinand de Saussure. Langue describes the social, impersonal phenomenon of language as a system of signs, while parole describes the individual, personal phenomenon of language as a series of speech acts* made by a linguistic subject.[1] (wikipedia.com) *The extension of speech acts is commonly taken to include such acts as promising, ordering, greeting, warning, inviting someone and congratulating.

5 Competence and performance This fundamental distinction is discussed by Chomsky in his Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965). A language user's underlying knowledge about the system of rules is called his linguistic competence. Performance refers to the actual use of language in concrete situations.

Noam Chomsky  COMPETENCE / PERFORMANCE COMPETENCE: a person’s internalised knowledge of a language. This means a person’s ability to create and understand sentences, including sentences they have never heard before. COMPETENCE refers to the “ideal” speaker/hearer COMPETENCE is a cognitive (mental) skill.

Noam Chomsky  COMPETENCE / PERFORMANCE Grammatical competence (correctness) Communicative competence (appropriateness) Pragmatic competence (capacity to interpret sentences using non-linguistic information)

Noam Chomsky  COMPETENCE / PERFORMANCE “ the actual use of language in concrete situations” how a person actually uses his/her language knowledge in producing and understanding utterances, including errors.. “There are rules of use without which the rules of grammar would be useless”

Langue / Parole - Competence / Performance De Saussure’s distinction between LANGUE and PAROLE is similar to Chomsky’s distinction between COMPETENCE and PERFORMANCE, BUT for De Saussure the repository of LANGUE is the speech community, for Chomsky the repository of COMPETENCE is the individual ideal speaker/hearer.

Competence Competence is a person’s underlying (subconscious) linguistic ability to create and understand sentences, including sentences they have never heard before. It’s a person's acquaintance with a set of grammatical rules and is different from the actual linguistic activities. Linguistic competence includes components such as phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics and morphology.

Competence enables native speaker to recognize ambiguous sentences or accept even apparently meaningless sentences as syntactically correct (and even making some sense). Even if you’ve never heard these before, you know which one is “English” and which one isn’t. Example: Eight very lazy elephants drank coke. *Eight elephants very lazy coke drank.

Performance Performance is the real world linguistic output. May accurately reflect competence, but it also may include speech errors. Performance may be flawed because of memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) or other psychological factors. Represents only a small sample of possible utterances.

Performance error The performance of a speaker may not be fault free, even though his competence is perfect. Analogy: Learning and riding a bike.

Why is it important to make a distinction between competence and performance? It allows those studying a language to differentiate between a speech error and not knowing something about the language. To understand this distinction, it is helpful to think about a time when you've made some sort of error in your speech.

Is this error due to competence or performance? For example, let's say you are a native speaker of English and utter the following: “We swimmed in the ocean this weekend.” Is this error due to competence or performance? It isn't that you don't know that the past tense of swim is swam, you've just mistakenly applied the regular rule to an irregular verb.   Distinction between competence and performance illustrates the difference between accidentally saying “swimmed” and the fact that a child or non-proficient speaker of English may not know that the past tense of swim is “swam” and say “swimmed” consistently. Your competence is fine, it is your performance that has let you down. you know how to conjugate irregular English verbs

Competence versus performance Competence, being an ideal, is located as a psychological or mental property. This is in contrast to performance, which refers to an actual event. 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.

Reference http://www.itiscannizzaro.net/Ianni/ http://www.slideshare.net/sahilgupta/ling-prez-2