Johanna Rubba wrote:

> As to Bob's assertion that you can study language out of context, and
> that that is the underpinning for the competence-performance
> distinction, he will know as well as any linguist that the
> competence-performance distinction is not accepted by most
> functionalists and is therefore part of the formalist/functionalist
> divide. One can study language out of context, but language never occurs
> out of a context, so why study it that way?

A question left unanswered seems to suggest the answer is obvious to everyone.
The expected answer is not obvious to me.  In fact, the answer to the question has
important implications for teaching about  language.

In my last post, I noted that double negatives in a clause do not mean the same
as a strictly positive statement.  (a) is a less positive statement than (b).  This
is true
regardless of the context either sentence might occur in.

a) The bombing in Afghanistan has not been ineffective.
b) The bombing in Afghanistan has been effective.

Observations like this are important if we are interested in the choices students
make
in their texts.  This is an observation made without establishing an elaborate
corpus of examples.  The claim can be easily falsifiable: provide a set of
sentences like (a) and (b) and show that the (a) sentence with the two negatives
are at least as positive or more positive than the (a) sentence.  I don't think
such a set of sentences exists.

More importantly, the performance-competence distinction seems to be an essential
aspect of many of the tips for teaching grammar to be found on the ateg website.
See http://ateg.org/grammar/tips.htm  (I suggest looking at finding verbs, comma
splices, and two methods for finding subject and predicates)

Consider the following example about helping students to identify a fragment.

"If students are not sure whether a group of words is a complete sentence or not,
they can put a phrase such as the following in front of it: "They refused to
believe the idea that . . . . "
            If the resulting sentence makes sense, the group of words is a complete
sentence.  Otherwise, it's a fragment.  Every time.

1.  Whatever you could do to help my sister.
     *They refused to believe the idea that whatever you could do to help my
sister. "

(If I recall correctly, Johanna has cited this test herself as a way for students
to identify fragments.  I apologize in advance if my memory is faulty.)

If  there is no such thing as the competence-performance distinction, then this
test should not work.  It depends on assuming that EVERY native speaker of English
knows that whatever string can go after "they refused to believe the idea that . .
. " must be an independent clause.  Moreover, it works without ANY reference to the
context of the string of words which are put after "they refused to believe the
idea that. . ."  Or, as the website has it: "Otherwise, it's a fragment.  Every
time."

The first example in this teaching tip also shows the value of the
competence-performance distinction in teaching grammar.  The example assumes that
anyone who consults this page will recognize that "they refused to believe the idea
that whatever you could do to help my sister" is ungrammatical.

I don't know how someone committed to studying language only in context would
recognize ungrammatical sentences at all.  Ungrammatical sentences do not get
tagged in any obvious way by those who utter or write them.  The example in the
teaching tip is obviously constructed without context.  In fact, I don't think
anyone in a normal context has ever uttered that ungrammatical string.  That we all
recognize that sentence as ungrammatical says something about our underlying
competence of what are grammatical and ungrammatical strings.

(When I give such reasoning, I have some students tell me they know a string is
ungrammatical because they have never heard it.  This explanation has several
problems.  First, it seems to assume that people remember every sting they have
every heard.  This doesn't seem very plausible.  Two, we hear new strings every day
that we have never heard before and recognize them as possible sentences in
English.  For example, it is perfect grammatical to relativize the object of a
comparative in English "here is the dog that my dog is faster than."    It is even
possible to relativize the genitive of the object of a comparative "here is the dog
whose sister my dog is faster than." Such constructions don't occur very frequently
in English, yet every speaker of English recognizes them as perfectly grammatical.
Even without context we can judge such sentences as being grammatical or
ungrammatical.  Of course, this is why the teaching tip works.)

As someone who believes that the competence-performance distinction is useful (and
I think many of the the teaching tips clearly demonstrate its utility for teaching
), I find constructing sentences to test hypotheses about what sentences are or are
not possible a perfectly reasonable way to study the underlying principles of a
language.  Before I am misunderstood, I am not saying it is the ONLY way language
must be studied.

Here is my answer to the unanswered questioned above.  Studying language without
context can reveal important knowledge that all native speakers have about
language.  Making up sentences and judging whether they are possible or not
possible is an important part of the data for determining this knowledge.  Finally,
and especially relevant for the goals of ATEG, the kinds of tests such an
enterprise creates actually has value in teaching students about their own
knowledge of English.

Bob Yates, Central Missouri State University

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