Speculations on performance models

Abstract

The publication ofSyntactic Structuresin 1957 stimulated a much-needed re-evaluation among linguists as to the goals of linguistic theory and the nature of language. Part of the discussion which has ensued has centred around the question of linguistic competence versus performance. Competence has been related to performance as ‘langue’ is to ‘parole’. ‘Competence’ thus refers to the ‘underlying system of rules that has been mastered by the speaker-hearer’ (Chomsky, 1965) and ‘performance’ to the way the speaker-hearer utilizes this ‘internalized grammar’ when he actually produces and understands utterances. Despite the continued controversy about this distinction, little can be added to the justifications for it put forth over many decades (cf. Chomsky, 1957, 1964, 1965; Katz, 1964, 1966; Postal, 1966; Sapir, 1933; Levin, 1965; de Saussure, 1916; etc.). Yet there remains much vagueness as to the limits of each and the relationship between the two. For many years the confusion was due to the influence of Bloomfield who centred his attention on the speech act; his aim was the classification of the OUTPUT of performance, i.e. the utterances, and led to no theory about the dynamic process of performance itself (Bloomfield, 1924, 1926, 1927, 1933). While giving lip service to a concern for ‘langue’, his own mechanistic approach negated any possibility for the rules of ‘langue’ to be anything more than lists of recurrent patterns found in ‘parole’. And since he was of the opinion that ‘the physiologic and acoustic description of acts of speech belongs to other sciences than ours’ (Bloomfield, 1926: 153) he did not direct himself to those aspects of ‘parole’ which could explain speech performance.