LINGÜÍSTICS

COMPETENCE
AND
PERFORMANC
E
 COMPETENCE AND
1. Competence
PERFORMANCE
Refers to a speaker's knowledge of his language as
manifest in his ability to produce and to understand a
theoretically infinite number of sentences most of which
he may have never seen or heard before.

2. Performance
Performance refers to the specific utterances, including
grammatical mistakes and non-linguistic features like
hesitations, accompanying the use of language..
Competence like organization describes the potentiality of
a system.
was used by Noam Chomsky in 1960 to describe "the
actual use of language in concrete situations".
 LINGUISTIC KNOLEDGE
• There is a difference between having the
knowledge to produce sentences and
applying this knowledge. What we know is
linguistic competence. How we use this
knowledge is linguistic performance. 

• Linguistic knowledge is unconscious

knowledge and is acquired with no
conscious awareness. 
CREATIVITY OF LANGUAGE

• The ability to produce infinite

sentences by combining
words. The ability to produce
sentences never spoken
before and to understand new
sentences never Heard
before.
Descriptive
and
prescriptive
grammar .
 GRAMMAR

DEFINITION
Linguistic Universals
 COMMOM LINGUISTIC
UNIVERSALS
1. Where human exist, language exist.

2. There are no primitive language, all languages are equally complex and
capable to express ideas. Vocabulary of any language can be expanded to
include new words for new concepts.

3. All languages change through the time.

I4. In all languages the relationship between the sound and meaning and
between gestures (sign) are for most part are arbitrary

5. All human languages have a finite set of sounds or human gestures that
are combined to fun meaningful elements of words, with form an infinite
set of possible sentences.
6. All grammars contain rules for the formation of words and sentences of a
similar kind.
7. All spoken language include discrete sound segments like /p/ /n/ which can be
defined by a finite set of sounds properties of features.
8. Every spoken language has a class of vowels and a class of consonants
9. All languages have similar grammatical categories : nouns, verbs, adjectives,
prepositions, et
10. All languages have universal such as “male and female”; “animate or
human”
11. In all languages we can use past time, present, future, form questions, use
commands.
12. Any normal child is capable learning any language despite geographic,
social, economic o racial heritage.
Animal Language
vs
Human Language
ANIMAL LANGUAGE AND HUMAN
LANGUAGE
• There are properties
that are largely
unique to human
language:
• duality, creativity,
displacement,
• cultural transmission,
arbitrariness.