I think there is a serious misunderstanding on both Herb Stahlke and Johanna
Rubba's part about the competence-performance distinction.

Herb Stahlke wrote:

> At the risk of taking us down a rabbit hole, the Chomskyan notion of
> competence is a puzzling one.  Not only is its content subject to the
> vagaries of theory development, but it's not clear what function the
> ability to judge well-formedness serves, beyond syntactic research.

Any serious inquiry will have questions about what is or is not part of the data to
be considered.  The only way to avoid this is to claim that any approach can be
valid.  No serious inquiry allows such relativism.

The distinction is not puzzling at all.  I suggest one consults A Comprehensive
Grammar of English or any text on English grammar.  Those books attempt to describe
the knowledge about English which every native speaker of English has.  If such
texts aren't telling us about the knowledge native speakers have about English,
then would either Johanna and Herb tell me what those texts are doing?

As for the notion that well-formedness judgments only serve a particular narrow
type of linguistic research, I again refer to a  previous post.  I cited the
teaching tips on the ATEG website which use judgment tasks to determine what are or
are not possible types of structures in English.  In other words, well-formedness
conditions can be exploited in the classroom and members of ATEG freely use that
ability in their teaching tips.   Again, if I have mischaracterized those teaching
tips as exploiting students' ability to make grammaticality judgments, would Herb
please explain my error?

By the way, Rei Noguchi exploits this ability in his text, too.

> Linguists differ in their judgments, and non-linguists often find
> themselves baffled by how linguists make these judgments.  We clearly
> don't use this ability in communication, because we are constantly
> interpreting utterances that are not well-formed.

We don't use this ability?  Before September 11, slate.com had an on-going  section
entitled "Bushisms of the Day."  Many of those "bushism" were uninterpretable.  Of
course, for those who believe there is no competence performance distinction, I
would like to know  how Jacob Weisberg was able to figure out what snippets he
would reproduce as "a bushism."

> With apologies to =
> McCawley, a sentence like "I think over easy." is not well-formed, but in =
> answer to the question "How does Herb like his eggs?" it turns out to be a =
> straightforward ellipsis, just not one that can happen at the sentence =
> level and therefore not subject to sentence-level syntactic description.

Without making any reference to underlying knowledge of what is possible at the
sentence level, how does one arrive at the analysis of "straightforward ellipsis"?
Where is the ellipsis if we do not have an underlying knowledge of what kind of
complement the verb think takes?  How do we all know that Herb's ellipsis analysis
is right?

Johanna is right that judging sentences has a performance dimension to it.  This is
true anytime we use language including judgment tasks.  Given this observation,
however, we are not prevented from making judgments about what is or is not
possible in English.   Biber et al.'s Grammar of Written and Spoken English is
based on examining the structures which occur in US and UK English and in written
and spoken English.  Without an underlying abstract knowledge of what is possible
in English, how can a corpus linguist begin to search a corpus for relevant data?

In a previous post I noted in English it is possible to relativize the object of a
comparative.

     1) Here is the dog that my dog is bigger than __.

I heard Bill Rutherford say that he has found only one example of such a
construction in a written text.  Unless one is aware of the work on relative clause
formation in English, I suspect that many on this list are not aware (1) is a
possible sentence in English.  I have no idea whether I have ever written a
sentence like (1) and I strongly suspect that I have never seen an example like (1)
outside of a textbook on English.

If a linguist claims to be only interested in performance, then would that linguist
say that (1) is not a possible sentence in English?  Without the notion of
competence, what is the status of (1) as part of anyone's knowledge of English?

It seems to me that (1) poses a problem for this explanation from Johanna.

> We're performing when we are unconsciously constructing a
> sentence by following familiar patterns, and we are performing when are
> consciously comparing a given sentence to familiar patterns.

I maintain that (1) is not a familiar pattern to anyone on this list, yet it is a
perfectly a well-formed sentence.  If Johanna's story is right, then no one on this
list should have a judgment about whether (1) is or is not a possible sentence of
English.  That is not the case, so I suggest there is something wrong that we make
judgments based on our experience with "familiar patterns."

Bob Yates, Central Missouri State University

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