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Date: | Sun, 22 Jun 2008 22:46:48 -0500 |
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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