Linguistic Competence defines the system of rules that governs an individual’s tacit understanding of what is acceptable and what is not in the language they speak. The concept, introduced by the linguist Noam Chomsky in 1965, was intended to address certain assumptions about language, especially in structuralist linguistics, where the idea of an unconscious system had been extensively elaborated and schematized. Competence can be regarded as a revision of the idea of the language system. The empirical and formal realization of
competencewould be
performance, which thus corresponds to diverse structuralist notions of
parole,
utterance,
event,
process, etc. Chomsky argues that the unconscious system of linguistic relations, which Ferdinand de Saussure named
langue, is often mistakenly…
2104 words
Citation: Phillips, John, Chrissie Tan. "Competence, Linguistic". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 July 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=208, accessed 25 November 2024.]
