Bob,
I addressed this point in a previous email (clipped at end of this email apologies for length). I'll add, though, that what you're talking about doesn't require a competence/performance distinction in the sense Chomsky proposed it. It *does* require a langue/parole distinction, but does not require that the *fundamental* structure of langue be undetermined by processing considerations or input. Saussure did not call for UG. Competence/performance is, as far as I can determine, langue/parole with some additional conditions on it.
If you're claiming that only a competence/performance-distinguishing model can deal with those phenomena, you're wrong. If you're claiming that we can deal with them only by talking about what speakers seem to think/assume/believe about a language -- i.e., that we have to make some statements about internal states if we're making other than purely descriptive statements -- you're right. But *lots* of theories, including most functionalist ones, are in the same camp you are on that one.
Sincerely,
Bill Spruiell
------------------ Start Clip ----------------------------------------------------
I should probably clarify my comments a bit. You'll notice toward the end of that earlier post, I throw in the following:
>>I think functionalists in general don’t mind claiming that performance
>>(including comprehension in a social context, rather than just
>>production) partly creates competence as an epiphenomenon...<<
The "partly" was there by intention, as was the entailment that competence exists (you can't create something that is nonexistent....well, barring certain interpretations of null-elements). Obviously, native speakers do have the ability to recognize if novel strings are acceptable in their language or not. Production and comprehension appear to conform to certain norms, and it's hard to deal with that without positing some kind of "rest state" system (not impossible, since I *think* Eco's semiotics manages it, but I'm by no means positive). Functionalists tend to think the fundamental characteristics of that system are determined by general cognitive constraints together with *meaningful* interaction with other speakers, rather than by the operation of a specific-only-to-language module on a semantically neutral set of input strings. If for "competence" we substitute "how one expects the language to act, given what's gone before," we've got something closer to the functionalist conception (or at least, my version of it). I also don't expect the waiter at a diner to give me apple pie before my meatloaf, or to put the meatloaf on top of a three-inch layer of uncooked cornmeal -- those aren't linguistic expectations, but from my perspective, they're fundamentally the same *kind* of expectations. After all, my parents never told me, "Son....don't put the meatloaf on a three-inch layer of uncooked cornmeal. It's just wrong." Somehow, the absence of negative evidence didn't prevent acquisition.
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Robert Yates
Sent: Saturday, February 21, 2009 11:03 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: On the importance of the competence-performance distinction for language teachers
In the discussion on the theory of language, Bill Spruill (on 2/11)
wrote:
“It doesn't do the wider public any good, though, *especially* since a
majority of the differences between the paradigms has no real
implication for what we need to do in classrooms.”
I want to demonstrate that an important difference between views on
language makes a very real difference in the disposition we as teachers
need to have in understanding what our students do and how we respond to
what they do.
The difference I consider here is whether we need a
competence-performance distinction in our understanding of language or
whether performance is the only way to consider language. In other
words, whether there is a difference between our knowledge about what is
possible in a language (competence) and how that knowledge is used
(performance) or the distinction doesn’t exist at all. In an earlier
post Craig noted:
“For a formal or structural grammar, you need to theorize ways in which
knowledge of the underlying forms can be put to work. In a functional
model, those connections are already there.”
I claim a teacher must theorize about how knowledge of underlying forms
are put to work by our students. Consider sentence (1) that one of my
non-native speakers (a graduate students whose first language is
Chinese) wrote:
1) They are not agree with the Input Hypothesis.
(1) is obviously ungrammatical: ARE should be DO. I’m interested in
trying to understand why a non-native speaker would write (1) because,
if I can figure out why, my correction may prevent the error in future
writing.
I can only speculate on how someone who believes language can be
understood as performance would respond to this sentence. (I hope I
will be corrected on the following if it is not correct.)
From a performance perspective, when to use IS/ARE and DO in making
sentences negative can appear to be confusing. Consider 2 and 3.
2) They do not agree with X.
3) They are not agreeing with X.
So, perhaps if we only know performance, the writer of (1) is confused
about DO or ARE and “agree” just lacks -ing. And, of course, such
learners will see sentences like (4).
4) They are not in agreement with X.
So, from a performance perspective, the number of different forms a
learner might encounter with “agree” is so variable, the learner has no
clear indication whether ARE or DO is appropriate. Moreover, we as
teachers cannot be sure whether the student should have written
“agreeing” or “in agreement.”
On the other hand, if we as teachers understand language to have a
competence-performance distinction, another explanation for (1) is
possible. If the learner’s underlying knowledge about AGREE is that it
is an adjective and not a verb, then what makes this sentence
ungrammatical is not with ARE (or missing morphology on “agree”) but
with what word category the learner has assigned AGREE to. So, because
AGREE for this student is an adjective, ARE is the only form possible.
In fact, that is exactly what the student told me.
Craig, in the passage I cited above, is absolutely correct. As a
teacher, I had to theorize on how this writer’s underlying competence
(agree is an adjective) lead to the ungrammatical sentence.. Such
theorizing, I believe, is a disposition all teachers need to have to
respond to their students’ writing.
I hope this example of a real sentence a real student wrote shows that a
whole lot is at stake in how we understand what it means to know
language.
Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri
(By the way, if we as teachers had done the obvious surface correction
of sentence (1)– cross-out the ARE and insert DO, we really haven’t
provided much help to the student. The student has to figure out why the
ARE was crossed out and DO was inserted. That would require the student
to realize that only verbs require do-support when made negative and BE
is used for adjectives. A student who could arrive at such a conclusby just crossing out ARE and replacing it with DO probably wouldn’t
write (1) in the first place.)
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