The Relationship between Competence and Performance: Towards a Comprehensive TG Grammar

Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures (1957) has proved to be a turning point in the twentieth century’s linguistics. He proposes his linguistic theory of generative grammar, which departed radically from the structuralism and behaviourism of the previous decades. Earlier analyses of sentences have been shown to be inadequate in more than one respect because they failed to take into account the differences between ‘surface’ and ‘deep’ levels of grammatical structure. A major aim of generative grammar was to provide a means of analysing sentences that take account of this underlying level of structure. To achieve this aim, Chomsky drew a fundamental distinction (similar to Saussure’s langue and parole) between a person’s knowledge of the rules of a language and the actual use of that language in real situations. The first he referred to as competence; the second as performance. Linguistics, he argued, should be concerned with the study of competence, and not restrict itself to performance