In linguistics, linguistic competence is the system of unconscious knowledge that one has when one knows a language. It is distinguished from linguistic performance, which includes all other factors that allow one to use language in practice. In approaches to linguistics which adopt this distinction, competence would normally be considered responsible for the fact that "I like ice cream" is a possible sentence of English, the particular proposition that it denotes, and the particular sequence of phones that it consists of. Performance, on the other hand, would be responsible for the real-time processing required to produce or comprehend it, for the particular role it plays in a discourse, and for the particular sound wave one might produce while uttering it. The distinction is widely adopted in formal linguistics, where competence and performance are typically studied independently. However, it is not used in other approaches including functional linguistics and cognitive linguistics, and it has been criticized in particular for turning performance into a wastebasket for hard-to-handle phenomena.
Competence versus performance
Competence is the collection of subconscious rules that one knows when one knows a language; performance is the system which puts these rules to use. This distinction is related to the broader notion of Marr's levels used in other cognitive sciences, with competence corresponding to Marr's computational level. For example, many linguistic theories, particularly in generative grammar, give competence-based explanations for why English speakers would judge the sentence in (1) as odd. In these explanations, the sentence would be ungrammatical because the rules of English only generate sentences where demonstratives agree with the grammatical number of their associated noun.
(1) *That cats is eating the mouse. By contrast, generative theories generally provide performance-based explanations for the oddness of center embedding sentences like one in (2). According to such explanations, the grammar of English could in principle generate such sentences, but doing so in practice is so taxing on working memory that the sentence ends up being unparsable.
(2) *The cat that the dog that the man fed chased meowed. In general, performance-based explanations deliver a simpler theory of grammar at the cost of additional assumptions about memory and parsing. As a result, the choice between a competence-based explanation and a performance-based explanation for a given phenomenon is not always obvious and can require investigating whether the additional assumptions are supported by independent evidence. For example, while many generative models of syntax explain island effects by positing constraints within the grammar, it has also been argued that some or all of these constraints are in fact the result of limitations on performance.
Critiques A broad front of linguists have critiqued the notion of linguistic competence, often severely. Proponents of usage-based approaches to linguistics argue that what generativists would call competence is in fact derived from performance. Sociolinguists have argued that the competence-performance distinction basically serves to privilege data from certain linguistic genres and socio-linguistic registers as used by the prestige group, while discounting evidence from low-prestige genres and registers as being simply mis-performance. Noted linguist John Lyons, who works on semantics, has said:
Chomsky's use of the term performance to cover everything that does not fall within the scope of a deliberately idealized and theoretically restricted concept of linguistic competence, was perhaps unfortunate. Dell Hymes, quoting Lyons as above, says that "probably now there is widespread agreement" with the above statement. Many linguists including M.A.K. Halliday and Labov have argued that the competence-performance distinction makes it difficult to explain language change and grammaticalization, which can be viewed as changes in performance rather than competence. Another critique of the concept of linguistic competence is that it does not fit the data from actual usage where the felicity of an utterance often depends largely on the communicative context. Neurolinguist Harold Goodglass has argued that performance and competence are intertwined in the mind, since, "like storage and retrieval, they are inextricably linked in brain damage." Distributed representations, simple recurrent networks, and grammatical structure. resulted in a wide questioning of nativist assumptions underlying psycholinguistic work up to the nineties. Some researchers working on discourse reject the competence-performance distinction due to the difficulty of determining whether an utterance is well-formed or not and the fact that dialogue is inherently interactive.
Pragmatics and communicative competence
Dell Hymes proposed a broadening of linguistic competence into what he called communicative competence. This notion included social aspects of language which generative linguists would have regarded as performance.
Related areas of study Linguistic competence is commonly used and discussed in many language acquisition studies. Some of the more common ones are in the language acquisition of children, aphasics and multilinguals.
Child language
The Chomskyan view of language acquisition argues that humans have an innate ability – universal grammar – to acquire language. However, a list of universal aspects underlying all languages has been hard to identify. Another view, held by scientists specializing in Language acquisition, such as Tomasello, argues that young children's early language is concrete and item-based which implies that their speech is based on the lexical items known to them from the environment and the language of their caretakers. In addition, children do not produce creative utterances about past experiences and future expectations because they have not had enough exposure to their target language to do so. Thus, this indicates that the exposure to language plays more of a role in a child's linguistic competence than just their innate abilities.
Aphasia
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