Introduction
Hello and welcome back! In our last lesson, we created a "map" of linguistics, identifying its core subfields—from the sounds of phonetics to the sentence structures of syntax—and saw how they interrelate. This gave us a sense of what linguists study.
Today, we shift our focus to a foundational concept that shapes how linguists think about language itself. Your goal for this lesson is to illustrate the distinction between linguistic competence and performance using concrete examples. This idea, introduced by the influential linguist Noam Chomsky, is crucial for understanding the difference between our internal, unconscious knowledge of a language and how we actually use it in the real world.
For someone with your background in literature and writing, this distinction provides a powerful framework for thinking about "mistakes." Why does a skilled writer sometimes make a simple typo? Why does a fluent speaker occasionally stumble over their words? This lesson will move us beyond a simple "right vs. wrong" viewpoint to a more nuanced, scientific understanding of linguistic knowledge.
What We Know vs. What We Do
The core idea is that every language user has two sides to their linguistic ability:
- Linguistic Competence: This is your hidden, unconscious knowledge of the rules of your language. It's your mental grammar—the internalized system that allows you to create and understand a potentially infinite number of sentences you've never heard before.
- Linguistic Performance: This is the actual, observable use of language in real situations—speaking, writing, signing. It's the physical manifestation of your competence.
The key is that performance is not a perfect reflection of competence. Let's explore why.
Digging into Competence: The Grammar in Your Head
Your linguistic competence is a vast, abstract system of rules you know intuitively. You can demonstrate this knowledge even if you can't explain the formal grammatical terms. A great way to see this in action is by looking at how we form different sentence structures, like the passive voice.
Please watch the first part of the following video, which defines competence and uses a fantastic example to show how your internal grammar works without you even thinking about it.
Linguistic Competence versus Performance
The video 'Linguistic Competence versus Performance' from Love Linguage introduces the core concepts for today's lesson. This first segment defines competence as an 'internal mental grammar' and demonstrates it with the active-passive transformation.
Watch the clip from 00:32 to 04:38. Notice how you automatically know how to change a sentence like 'Tommy threw the ball' into 'The ball was thrown by Tommy,' even if you don't remember the grammatical terminology. This intuitive ability is a direct window into your linguistic competence.
As the video demonstrates, you didn't need to consult a grammar book to change an active sentence to a passive one. You just knew to:
- Move the object ("the ball") to the subject position.
- Change the verb form ("threw" to "was thrown").
- Add "by" and move the original subject ("Tommy") to the end of the phrase.
This complex set of operations is guided by your competence. It's the silent, powerful engine that linguists who study phonology, morphology, and syntax seek to understand and model.
When Reality Intervenes: Linguistic Performance
If competence is the perfect blueprint, performance is the actual constructed building, with all its real-world imperfections. While competence is idealized, performance is affected by a host of non-linguistic factors.
The next part of the same video gives excellent, relatable examples of performance phenomena—specifically, performance "errors."
Linguistic Competence versus Performance
Now, let's look at the other side of the coin. This next segment from the 'Linguistic Competence versus Performance' video explores the various ways our actual use of language can diverge from our internal knowledge.
Please watch from 04:38 to 08:21. Pay attention to the different types of performance errors discussed: false starts, slips of the tongue, and crucially for your writing background, errors with homophones (like 'their'/'there'/'they're').
As you just saw, our speech and writing are full of things that aren't in our "mental grammar":
- Slips of the tongue: Saying "power flot" instead of "flower pot."
- False starts & hesitations: "She and, um, they went to the store."
- Typos & homophone errors: Writing "I went to there house."
Does making one of these errors mean you don't know the correct word or spelling? Of course not. It simply means that some external factor—fatigue, distraction, memory lapse, the speed of typing—caused a temporary glitch in your performance. Your underlying competence remains intact.
Putting It All Together: A Tale of Two Errors
To solidify this distinction, let's analyze two different kinds of "mistakes." One reveals a performance issue, while the other suggests an issue with competence. The following reading provides a concise summary and a classic example.
This webpage from the University of Alberta, 'Competency versus Performance,' offers a clear, text-based explanation of the distinction and its importance.
Please read the first two sections, titled 'What is the difference between competence and performance?' and 'Why is it important to make a distinction between competence and performance?'. Focus on the example sentence: 'We swimmed in the ocean this weekend.'
Let's break down the examples based on what you've just read and watched.
Scenario 1: A native English speaker says, "We swimmed in the ocean."
- Analysis: This is a classic performance error. The speaker's competence includes the knowledge that swim is an irregular verb and its past tense is swam. However, in the moment of speaking, the more common, regular past-tense rule (-ed) was applied instead. This "overregularization" error shows that the speaker does have competence in the general rule; their performance just failed to access the specific exception.
Scenario 2: A beginner learning English says, "I swimmed yesterday." And "I walk-ed yesterday." And "I eat-ed yesterday."
- Analysis: This likely reflects a gap in competence. This learner has correctly identified that "-ed" marks the past tense but has not yet learned the rule's exceptions (ate) or even the full system of irregular verbs. Their performance is a direct and consistent reflection of their current (incomplete) mental grammar.
The linguist's job is to see past the "error" in Scenario 1 to the rule-governed system underneath. For the linguist, a native speaker's slip of the tongue is not just noise; it's data that can reveal how language is processed in the brain under pressure.
Test your understanding!
For each of the following situations, decide whether the linguistic "problem" is more likely a matter of competence or performance. Briefly explain why.
- A news anchor, live on air, accidentally says "the President of the Untied States."
- A 4-year-old child, talking about his two pets, says "I have two mouses."
- An advanced learner of French who has lived in Paris for years consistently uses the wrong gender for certain nouns, for example, saying le voiture (masculine "the") instead of the correct la voiture (feminine "the").
- While hastily typing an email to a friend, you write "Let's grab a bear later" instead of "beer."
Show answer
- Performance. This is a classic slip of the tongue (a "spoonerism"). The anchor clearly knows the correct phrase, but a momentary cognitive hiccup caused the initial sounds of two words to be swapped.
- Performance (reflecting competence in a general rule!). Like the "swimmed" example, this shows the child has acquired the general rule for forming plurals in English (add -s). They simply haven't mastered the specific exception for mouse -> mice. Their performance reflects a developing, but rule-governed, competence.
- Competence. Grammatical gender in French is notoriously difficult for English-speaking learners. The fact that the error is consistent suggests that the correct gender for this noun is not securely part of the learner's mental grammar (their competence), even though their overall fluency is high.
- Performance. This is a simple typo, likely caused by the speed of typing and the proximity of the 'a' and 'e' keys. Your competence in the word "beer" is not in question.
Conclusion
Today we've unpacked one of the most fundamental distinctions in modern linguistics. By separating the idealized, abstract knowledge of language (competence) from its messy, real-world application (performance), we can begin to study the linguistic system in a more scientific way.
Key takeaways:
- Linguistic Competence is your unconscious, internal "mental grammar"—the system of rules you know as a native speaker.
- Linguistic Performance is the actual production of speech and writing, which can be affected by memory, fatigue, attention, and other non-linguistic factors.
- "Errors" made by competent speakers (like slips of the tongue or typos) are performance issues and do not reflect a lack of knowledge. They are often evidence of the underlying rules at work.
- Distinguishing between the two helps linguists analyze the underlying structure of language without getting sidetracked by the "noise" of everyday speech.
A Look Ahead:
This lesson has helped us see that a native speaker's "mistakes" don't make their language knowledge invalid. In our next lesson, we will expand on this idea to explore how linguists approach entire varieties of language that differ from the "standard." We will learn to apply the principle of descriptivism when analyzing non-standard language varieties or informal speech. You'll see that what is often dismissed as "bad grammar" is, from a linguistic perspective, a perfectly valid, rule-governed system with its own unique competence.