李元胜 2与013年秋 语言学Chapter1invitationstolinguistics .pptVIP

3) A speaker’s competence might be perfect, but his performances can’t avoid imperfection. Eg.: Imperfect performance a slip of tongue 口误 false starts 头起错了 unnecessary pauses hesitation , mouth fillers 语塞 Relations b/t competence performance Differences between competence and performance Chomsky believes that linguists ought to study competence, rather than performance. In other words, they should discover what an ideal speaker knows of his native language. Competence Performance It enables a speaker to produce and understand an indefinite number of sentences and to recognize grammatical mistakes and ambiguities; It is stable. Performance is often influenced by psychological and social factors; it is not stable. * Saussure Vs. Chomsky Not exactly the same, though similar. Langue-parole Comp-performance Langue is a social product and a set of conventions for a community Competence is deemed as a property of the mind of each individual Saussure looks at language from a sociological or sociolinguistic point of view N. Chomsky deals with his issues psychologically or psycholinguistically. * Exercises: (1) true or false 1. There is an intrinsic association between the form and meaning of a linguistic sign. 2. It is the convention that links a linguistic sign and its meaning. 3. Human language has two levels of structures: the structure of sounds and the structure of meanings--- this is the design feature of creativity, which makes it possible to use the limited sounds to create unlimited meanings. 4. Displacement is not a feature specific to human languages since honeybee’s dance also exhibits such kind of feature. 5. Utterances such as “how do you do?” and “ A nice day, isn’t it” usually perform____ function, for in these cases language is used to maintain social contact rather than exchanging information or ideas. 6. A book like The structure of Shakespeare’s English does a _____ study of a single, relatively static state of language. 7.