We're taking the competence-performance distinction out of context and changing its meaning, rather like what so many educators, psychologists and popular writers did with Chomsky's 1965 notion Deep Structure.  C-P is simply a rationale, after the fact, for partitioning linguistic data into those sentences that a generative grammar can handle and those that it can't.  As theories have developed, the membership of the sets of competence and performance have changed.  

When I was in graduate school, back in the late 60s, I had intense arguments with Barbara Partee about the role of intonation and contrastive stress in disambiguating sentences with negatives and quantifiers.  She claimed that all my data fell under performance and were therefore irrelevant to the theory.  Two years ago at the LSA winter meeting in Chicago, Janet Fodor presented a very formalist paper arguing that just such prosodic information had to be handled by the syntax.  Anyone who's followed these arguments over the years can come up with more examples.  There is no competence or performance.  There are only utterances.  Whether they are well-formed or not depends heavily on context.  

Certainly, there are utterances that are obviously well-formed without context but these represent archtypes rather than membership in a well-defined set.  Sentences like

What did you have a hamburger and for lunch?
What did you have and french fries for lunch?

are 

both ruled out by a competence grammar.  But I've heard the second in context.  Not the first.

A sentence like 

The policeman the boy the dog bit called came.

is a perfectly grammatical sentence within a competence grammar, but it quite literally boggles the mind.  My students, when I give them this sentence, frequently treat it as nothing more than a list of noun phrases and verbs.

A question that doesn't often get asked is why we can identify certain sentences as well-formed without any context.  What is it about such sentences that makes this possible?  This strikes me as the more remarkable fact, not that we understand ill-formed strings in context.   

Herb Stahlke

>>> [log in to unmask] 11/05/01 10:14PM >>>

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.

To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"

Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/