INTRODUCTION TO
LINGUISTICS
Lecture 2
dr Marcin Buczek
Linguistic Competence and
Linguistic Performance
As a speaker of English (or any other
language that you may be a speaker of),you
know a great deal about your language.
You know perfectly well how to speak English
but you are not consciously aware of most of
that knowledge.
The true for our knowledge of language: for
the most part, it is hidden. Linguists are
interested in this “hidden” knowledge, which
they refer to as linguistic competence.
Not all of your knowledge about language is
hidden, however. People reveal some of their
knowledge through their linguistic
performance—the way that they produce and
comprehend language.
You can think of linguistic competence as a
person’s unseen potential to speak a language,
while linguistic performance is the observable
realization of that potential: our performance is
what we do with our linguistic competence.
Performance errors
You may make performance errors when you
use language, such as being unable to
remember a word, mispronouncing something,
or jumbling the words in a sentence.
Sometimes there is an apparent reason: you
may be tired or distracted, or you may be
trying to produce a particularly difficult
utterance. Other times, however, there is no
apparent reason at all: you simply make a
mistake. Nonetheless, you still have your
linguistic competence.
The Speech Communication Chain
When you use language, you use it to
communicate an idea from your mind to the
mind of someone else.
Language is not the only way to do this.
The key elements in any communication
system are an information source, a
transmitter, a signal, a receiver, and a
destination.
When we use language as our communication
system, one person acts as the information
source and the transmitter, sending a signal to
another person, who acts as a receiver and
the destination.
This illustration shows the numerous steps
that must be carried out in order for an idea to
be communicated from one person to another.
First, an idea of something to be
communicated must be thought of; this is not
necessarily a function of language per se, but
it is certainly the first step in communicating
any idea. Once the idea is there, you have to
put the idea into words that have the meaning
you want to communicate and that are
expressed in a particular way
These steps form the backbone of much of
traditional linguistic research. Note that these
first four steps represent the “information
source” in the communication system. Step 5
is the transmitter; in this step, the speaker
actually gives physical expression to the idea
of the message to be conveyed. Step 6 is the
signal itself. Here, the sounds generated by
the speaker travel through the air to the
listener.
The listener acts as the receiver in step 7, sensing
the sound signal and sending it to her own brain.
Step 8 in the diagram is particularly simplified, in
that it really encompasses steps 2–4 in reverse.
That is, to “decode” the signal that has been
perceived and to interpret the signal as language,
the listener must understand and break down the
order of words (and parts of words) and what the
words mean. Finally, step 9 represents the
destination: the listener has received the
communicated idea.
Noise
Note that in the diagram, the listener in fact
receives exactly the same idea that the
speaker tried to convey. This, as you have
probably experienced, is an idealization: in
real life, the listener doesn’t always get the
right message. All of these steps take place in
a particular context that can either add to the
ability of all participants to understand the
communication or interfere with the success of
the communication (interference in the chain is
known as noise).
What You Know When You Know a
Language?
One of the most basic things that you know
when you know a language, assuming that
you use spoken language, is speech sounds.
First, you know which sounds are speech
sounds and which sounds are not;
If you hear a dog bark or a door slam, you will
not confuse it with the sounds of language.
You also know which speech sounds are
sounds of your language as opposed to some
other language.
Phonetics
Not only do you hear and recognize these sounds,
but you also know how to produce them, even
though you may have never had to think about the
mechanics of doing so. All of this knowledge has to
do with the area of language known as phonetics.
You also know how these sounds work together as
a system.
For instance, you know which sequences of sounds
are possible in different positions.
Your knowledge of phonology allows you to identify
that spaff and blig could be possible words of
English but that fsap and libg could not.
Phonology allows you to recognize sounds
and words spoken by different speakers, even
though most people do not pronounce them in
exactly the same way.
For the most part, speech consists of a
continuous stream of sound; there are few if
any pauses between words. Speakers of a
language, however, have little trouble breaking
this stream of sound down into words.
For example, an English speaker can easily
analyze the sequence in (a) as containing the
individual words in (b); this is what we must do
all the time when we hearspeech.
a. thedogisplayinginthebackyard
b. the dog is playing in the back yard
Morphology
You also know how to break individual words
down into smaller parts that have a particular
meaning or function (how many parts are there
in the word unbelievability?), and how to
create words by combining these smaller
parts.
That is, you can both produce and
comprehend newly composed words that you
haven’t heard before, for example,
ungiraffelike.
Morphology
You also know which combinations are words
and which ones aren’t: baker is a word, but
*erbake is not. Nicely is a word, but *bookly is
not.
Your knowledge of these and other facts about
word formation comprises your knowledge of
morphology
Syntax
You also know a great deal about your
language’s syntax. How words combine to
form phrases and sentences.
This fact is evidenced by your ability to
construct and use sentences that you have
never heard before, and to recognize when a
sentence is well-formed.
a. I will pick the package up at eight o’clock.
b. At eight o’clock, I will pick up the package.
c. * Package up pick at o’clock will the eight I.
d. * I will picks the package up at eight o’clock.
Semantics
Another part of your linguistic competence has
to do with your ability to determine the
meaning of sentences.
When you hear a word, such as platypus or
green or dawdle, you have some idea of a
meaning that goes with that word. You know
when two words mean the same thing—e.g.,
sofa and couch—and when one word has two
(or more) meanings —e.g., duck.
Semantics
You also know how words combine together to
form larger meanings.
(1) The green duck dawdled around the cactus.
(2) The duck dawdled around the green cactus.
(3) The platypus ducked under the sofa.
(4) The sofa ducked under the platypus.
Pragmatics
Your understanding of the meaning of
sentences also involves an understanding of
how the context of those utterances influences
their meaning.
“Can you close the door?”
Taken quite literally, you have been asked a
yes-no question about your door-closing
abilities, but you would probably not even think
of interpreting the question in that way;
instead, you would understand it as a request
to close the door.
How Your Linguistic Competence Is
Stored
Where this knowledge is?
Language isn’t tangible - sentence exists only
in my mind (and, after I have uttered it, it exists
in your mind as well).
I may write it down, the string of letters that
appears on the page is only a visual
representation of the sentence: it isn’t the
sentence itself.
Where does language exist?
It exists only in the minds of its
speakers. In some ways, you
can think of your linguistic
competence not only as your
ability to use language but also
as being language itself!
How Your Linguistic
Competence Is Stored
There are two parts of this knowledge.
The first part is called the lexicon, which
consists of the collection of all the words that
you know: what functions they serve, what
they refer to, how they are pronounced, and
how they are related to other words.
How Your Linguistic
Competence Is Stored
The second part of your knowledge is made
up of all the rules you know about your
language, which are stored in the form of a
mental grammar.
The words grammar and rule mean something
rather different to a linguist than they do to
most people in casual conversation.
A grammar is a language system. It is the set
of all the elements and rules (about phonetics,
phonology, morphology, syntax, and
semantics) that make up a language.
A rule, then, is just a statement of some
pattern that occurs in language. The rules in
your mental grammar help you to produce
well-formed utterances and to interpret the
utterances of others.
No two speakers have exactly the same
mental grammar, and therefore no two
speakers will find exactly the same set of
sentences well-formed.
No two speakers have exactly the same
mental grammar, and therefore no two
speakers will find exactly the same set of
sentences well-formed.
Our mental grammars are similar enough that
we disagree very seldom and are able to
understand one another most of the time.
In sum
Your linguistic competence is stored in a
lexicon and a mental grammar, which you
access in order to both produce and
comprehend utterances. Though you may not
be actively aware of all of the linguistic
knowledge that you have stored away, you
nonetheless use it all the time; it forms the
backbone of the communication chain.
