heard; the noise of the bus driving past can blot out a crucial word. Performance refers to the kinds of language that are actually produced and heard. Competence, by contrast, refers to what we know about our language; it is unimpeded by factors that might muddy the waters of performance. So, think about the really long complicated sentence in (15). The first time you read it, things like your memory and how complicated it was interfered with your ability to understand it. So the initial unacceptability of the sentence was due to a performance problem. But once you thought about it and stared at it a bit, you saw that it was actually a fairly standard grammatical sentence of English – just a really complicated one. When you did this, you were accessing your competence in (or knowledge of) English grammar. If syntax is part of cognitive science which is about what we know, then we should probably be most interested in competence.
This takes us to a new point. Listen carefully to someone speak (not lecture or read aloud, but someone really speaking in a conversation). You’ll notice that they don’t speak in grammatical sentences. They leave stuff off and they speak in fragments. They start and they stop the same sentence a couple of times. Everyone does this, even the most eloquent among us. So much of what you hear (or see in spoken language corpora) consists of actually “ungrammatical” forms. Nevertheless, if you’re a native English speaker, you have the ability to judge if a sentence is acceptable or not. These two tasks, understanding spoken conversational language and being able to judge the well- formedness of a sentence, seem to actually be different skills corresponding roughly to performance and competence.
An analogy that might clarify these distinctions: imagine that you’re a software engineer and you’re writing a piece of computer code. First you run it on your own beautiful up-to-date computer and it behaves beautifully. The output of the computer code is one kind of performance of the underlying competence. Then you run it on your little sister’s ancient PC. The program doesn’t perform as you expect. It’s really slow. It crashes. It causes the fan to run continuously and the processor to overheat. Now you go back and look at the code. There are no errors in the code. It meets all the requirements of the computer language. So, from the perspective of competence, your program is okay. The real problem here is not with your code, but with the machine you’re running it on. The processor is too old, there isn’t enough memory and you have a computer that tends to overheat. These are all performance problems.
What does this mean for the linguist using acceptability judgments as a tool for investigating syntax? It means that when using a judgment, you have to be really clear about what is causing the acceptability or unacceptability of the sentence. Is the sentence acceptable just because you have gleaned enough information from the conversational context (in which case we might consider it a performance effect)? If you hear a sentence that you judge as unacceptable, is it because someone was speaking too quickly and left out a word, or is it because the sentence really doesn’t work as an English sentence at all? This distinction is very subtle, but it is one that syntacticians have to pay careful attention to as they do their work.
5. A CLARIFICATION ON THE WORD “LANGUAGE”
When I use the term language, most people immediately think of some particular language such as English, French, or KiSwahili. But this is not the way most syntacticians use the term; when we talk about language, we are often really talking more about i-language (where the i- stands for “internal”), i.e., the internal psychological/cognitive tools i.e. our competence. Confusingly, we are often sloppy and also use the term language to refer to e-languages (where the e stands for “external”). E-languages are the instantiations of the output or performance of an i-language. E-languages are what we commonly conceive of particular languages (such as French or English). In this book, we’ll be using e-language as our primary data, but we’ll be trying to come up with a model of i-language. The difference between e-languages and i-languages is very similar to the old distinction Ferdinand de Saussure made between langue (i-language) and parole (e-language8). The linguist Seth Cable gave me a great analogy to help understand these notions. Imagine language is football. Competence is how deeply you understand the rules of the game. I-language is the rules of the game themselves. E-language is an actual game or match played and performance is how well you play in a that day.
To make things even more confusing linguistics sometimes use the term language to refer to the general ability of humans to acquire an i-language and to use that i-language to produce any (particular) e-language. Noam Chomsky calls this ability the Human Language Capacity (HLC). In our football analogy this would be how well you are equipped to play.
You now have enough information to answer WBE5, GPS5, and CPS7.
6. WHERE DO THE RULES COME FROM?
In this chapter, we’ve been talking about our subconscious knowledge of syntactic rules, but we haven’t dealt yet with how we get this knowledge. This is sort of a side issue, but it may affect the shape of our theory. If we know how children acquire their rules, then we are in a better position to develop a proper formalization of them. The way in which children develop knowledge is an important question in cognitive science. The theory of generative grammar makes some very specific (and very surprising) claims about this.
6.1 Learning vs. Acquisition
One of the most common misconceptions about language is the idea that children and adults “learn” languages. Recall that the basic kind of knowledge we are talking about here is subconscious knowledge. When producing a sentence, you don’t consciously think about where to put the subject, where to put the verb, etc. Your subconscious language faculty does that for you. Cognitive scientists make a distinction in how we get conscious and subconscious knowledge. Conscious knowledge (like the rules of algebra, syntactic theory, principles of organic chemistry or how to take apart a carburetor) is learned. A lot of subconscious knowledge, like how to speak or the ability to visually identify discrete objects, is acquired. In part, this explains why classes in the formal grammar of a foreign language often fail abysmally to train people to speak those languages. By contrast, being immersed in an environment where you can subconsciously acquire a language is much more effective. In this text we’ll be primarily interested in how people acquire the rules of their language. Not all rules of grammar are acquired, however. Some facts about i-language seem to be built into our brains, or innate.
You now have enough information to answer GPS6.
6.2 Innateness: Parts of i-Language as Instincts
If you think about the other types of knowledge that are subconscious, you’ll see that many of them (for example, the ability to walk) are built directly into our brains – they are instincts. No one had to teach you to walk (despite what your parents might think!). Kids start walking on their own. Walking is an instinct. Probably the most controversial claim that Noam Chomsky has made is that parts of i-language are also an instinct. That is many parts of i-language are built in, or innate. Chomsky claims that much of i- language is an ability hard-wired into our brains.
Obviously, particular languages (e-languages) are not innate. It is never the case that a child of Slovak parents growing up in North America who has never been spoken to in Slovak grows up speaking Slovak. They’ll speak English (or whatever other language is spoken around them). So, on the surface it seems crazy to claim that language is an instinct. But when we are talking about i-languages, there are very good reasons to believe, however, that a human facility (the Human Language Capacity) for language is innate. We call the innate parts of the HLC, Universal Grammar (or UG).
6.3 The Logical Problem of Language Acquisition
What
