Sociolinguistics

-Competence and performance

-Communicative competence and its
four components
 Competence and performance
Chomsky distinguishes between what he has called
competence and performance. He claims that it is the linguist’s
task to characterize what speakers know about their language,
that is, their competence, not what they do with their
language, that is, their performance.

In sociolinguistics We are primarily concerned with real

language in use (what Chomsky calls performance).

Labov maintains that ‘the linguistic behavior of individuals

cannot be understood without knowledge of the communities
that they belong to.’ This is the focus of sociolinguistics, and
what makes it different from Chomskyan linguistics.
The knowledge that we will seek to explain involves more
than knowledge of the grammar of the language, for it
will become apparent that speakers know, or are in
agreement about, more than that. Knowing a language
also means knowing how to use that language, since
speakers know not only how to form sentences but also
how to use them appropriately. There is therefore
another kind of competence, sometimes called
communicative competence, and the social aspects of
that competence will be our concern here.
 Culture and communicative competence

“A society’s culture consists of whatever it is one has to

know or believe in order to operate in a manner
acceptable to its members”(Goodenough 1957). Such
knowledge is socially acquired: the necessary
behaviors are learned and do not come from any kind
of genetic endowment.
Culture, therefore, is the ‘knowhow’ that a person
must possess to get through the task of daily living; for
language use, this is similar to the concept of
communicative competence we introduced above.
In Canale and Swain’s definition the construct of
communicative competence is made up of four different
components:
4. The fourth subcategory is strategic competence.
It refers to communication strategies that may be
called into action either to enhance the
effectiveness of communication or to compensate
for breakdowns. Strategic competence is the way
we manipulate language in order to meet
communicative goals.
 Sociolinguistic competence
In this subject we are going to study the many and varied
types of knowledge which people in different communities
acquire when they learn to use language appropriately in their
own community, what is known as sociolinguistic competence.

Learning a foreign language in a Western classroom often

seems at first to be a matter of learning the vocabulary and
grammar from a book, and struggling to imitate the
pronunciation of the teacher in class. But much more is
involved in knowing how to use language appropriately than
control of the linguistic structures.
These are some of the aspects of sociolinguistic
competence that we are going to study:

• Features of the different speech styles that people

use in socially distinct situations
• The use of language for different functions, such as
getting things done in different contexts
• What is involved in the ability to use language
effectively and politely to different people
• The different ways in which women and men use
language in interaction
• Approaches to the analysis of discourse
Task for next class
First assignment - exercise 1

Communicative competence. Look at the following joke about

British sayings and what they really mean. Discuss how this
depiction of cross-cultural miscommunication illustrates the
concept of communicative competence.

-WHAT THE BRITISH SAY

Could we consider some other options
-WHAT THE BRITISH MEAN
I don’t like your idea
-WHAT FOREIGNERS UNDERSTAND
They have not yet decided