Herb,

Thank you for your response.  Theories clearly change.  I have no problem with the fact that the distinction of competence and performance might be hard to make and has changed over time.

As someone who has taught a lot of writing to both native and non-native speakers, I know I am dealing with issues of both competence and performance.

I agree with the following list that cannot be defined within the domain of sentence.  

***
But let's look at phenomena that have syntactic consequences within sentences but that cannot be defined within the domain of the sentence:  focus, topicality, reference, and tense, to start with.  Many of the consequences for these can all be described at the sentence level for a particular language, but the larger phenomena are phenomena of discourse and of pragmatics, rendering their sentential effects epiphenomena.
***

In fact, Jim Kenkel and I have tried to look at how both native and non-native speakers try to achieve focus and topicality without the "standard" grammatical constructions. We have argued that labelling non-standard constructions as a "mixed constructions" or "fragment" or "run-on" are not very helpful because such labels do not provide any insight why developing writings have such forms in their writing.


I think the following suggests there is a competence-performance distinction.

***
This is not to say that native speakers don't have intuitions of grammaticality.  Clearly they do, but these intuitions are grounded, I suspect, in something more broadly cognitive and not in the endlessly shifting convenience of the competence/performance borderline.  
***

I have no idea what final statement might mean.  I have no idea what "more broadly cognitive" might explain the facts about the pronoun-antecedent relationships in the sentences I gave in my last post.   

Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri

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