Language Behaviour

&
Language System
By Pr. Chaabani
 what does it mean to know a language?

 Knowledge of a language means the ability to

articulate or produce strings of sounds, which
have certain meanings and understand sounds
produced by the users of the same language.
 Knowledge of the sounds and sound patterns
constitutes part of our linguistic knowledge.
 Linguistic knowledge is knowing about the
system which relates sounds and meanings
 knowing a language implies knowing its sounds, its sound combinations, and their
meaning.

Knowledge of
language

Sounds Their
Its sounds
combinations meaning
 knowledge of language

 knowledge of language also involves :

(i) The ability to arrange the speech sounds

into words

(ii) The ability to put words together to

form phrases and phrases to form sentences

(iii)The ability to produce and understand

sentences never spoken or heard before.
 Linguistic knowledge and
productivity
Thanks to our syntactic ability, we can produce an infinite number
of sentences, since every sentence can be made longer by the
addition of a phrase or clause after another clause:
This is the book
This is the book that Farid borrowed from the library
This is the title of the book that Farid borrowed from the library.
Language consists of all the sounds, words and possible sentences.
This is what Chomsky calls the creativity of language
 Competence VS Performance

 There is a difference between what you know and what you do.
 What the American linguist N. Chomsky called the distinction between
competence and performance.

is the speaker-hearer's knowledge of his language

Competence

is the actual use of language in concrete situations.

Performance

 knowing something is not the same as doing something.

 Linguistic Competence

 Linguistic Competence is the unconscious knowledge of a language

represented by the mental grammar that accounts for speakers’ linguistic ability
and creativity.

 Linguistic competence includes components such as phonetics, phonology,

syntax, morphology; it enables speakers to recognize ambiguous sentences :

 The lazy man drank juice

 * The man lazy juice drank

 Linguistic Performance

 Linguistic Performance is the use of linguistic competence in

the production and comprehension of language behaviour.
 Linguistic competence permits one-million word sentence, but
linguistic performance prevents this from happening in the real
world linguistic output.
 Linguistic Performance may also include speech errors,
because of speech limitations distractions, shifts of attention
and interest.
 Linguistic Performance represents only small sample of
possible utterances.
 Linguistic knowledge
&
performance limitations
 In using our linguistic competence, we make mistakes -slips of the
tongue, false starts, etc.
 Our linguistic knowledge enables us to recognise errors and to
correct ourselves.
 We would say that we have a performance limitations, but our
linguistic capacity is good.
 Take an example of a fluent speaker of English who has undergone a
dental surgery on a certain day, which leaves him temporarily
unable to talk(aching jaw muscles, and tooth pain).
 Would we say that he has lost his knowledge of English? Surely not.
 Performance presupposes Competence

 When producing our speech, we speak to convey a message, so we have to organize our
thoughts before we speak.

 Chomsky states that performance presupposes competence, whereas competence

doesn't presuppose performance.

Competence
Linguistic Performance
The actual
knowledge speech
 Langue VS Parole

 Ferdinand de Saussure the Swiss linguist, the founder of the structure of language in the
20th-century linguistics, set up a dichotomy between what he calls langue and parole

 what is potential and what is actual on the one hand, and the distinction between what is
social and what is individual on the other.

 Langue : is the system of grammar, spelling, syntax and punctuation we should master in
learning a language, (elements of langue). Langue precedes and makes speech possible.

 Parole : is the actual utterances ; it is an external manifestation of ‘Langue’.

 It is the usage of the system, but not the system.

 Langue VS Parole

 langue is any particular language that is the common possession of

all the members of a given language-community.
 It's the collective sum of rules used by all the members of a speech-
community in society.
 It's simply language-system which will contrast language-
behaviour or parole (the individual speech in society).
 Language-system is a social phenomenon, or institution which of
itself is purely abstract, in that it has no physical existence, but
which is actualised in particular occasions in the language -
behaviour
 Chomsky’s Vs De Saussure’s
Dichotomies
 Saussure's dichotomy is similar, though not
identical, to chomsky's distinction between
competence and performance.
 Saussure's langue has an explicit social orientation.
He gave special emphasis on the social or
institutional character of language-systems.
 Chomsky thought of linguistics as being closer to
cognitive psychology.
 Chomsky’s dichotomy has a mental orientation.
Thank you