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UNIT I - LYONS Language and Linguistics, an Introduction - Ch.

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2. CHANGE OF EMPHASIS
Chomsky attaches more importancia to the formal properties of language and to the nature of the rules
that their description requires than he does to the relations that hold between language and the world.
In doing this, he showed evidence that supported his theory that the human language faculty is innate
and species-specific. Thus, any property of language that can be accounted for in terms of its functional
utility or its reflection of the structure of the physical world can -and should- be discounted from this
point of view.
Bloomfield and his followers emphasized the structural diversity of languages (as did the majority of
post-sSausurrean structuralists). It was actually Saussure who said: "In language, there are only
differences".
3. THE COMPETENCE-PERFORMANCE DISTINCTION
Significant differences between Chomskyan generativism and both Bloomfieldian and post-Bloomfielfian
structuralism
1. LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS
Generativists, in contrast, are more interested in what languages have in common. Generativism thus
represents a return to the older tradition of UG -- as exemplified by the Port-Royal grammar of 1660,
which both Bloomfield and Saussure condemned as speculative and unscientific.
Saussure gives the impression that the sentences of a language are instances of parole , and langue is
discussed as a system of relations. Little do structuralists say about the rules required to generate new
senteces.
Chomsky, on the other hand, has insisted from the beginning that the capacity to produce and
understand syntactically well-formed senteces is a central part of the speaker's linguistic competence.
In this respect, generativism is closer to Saussurean structuralism. A speaker's linguistic competence is
that part of his knowledge of the language-system as such, by virtue of which he is able too produce the
indefinitely large set of sentecens that makes up HIS language. Linguistic competence is a set of rules
that the speaker has constructed in his mind applying his innate capacity for language-acquisition to
the language-data that he has heard around him in childhood and continued to be in contact with
throughout his entire life.
Performance, on the other hand, is language behaviour, determined by the speaker's competence, a
variety of non-linguistic factors -- such as social conventions, attitudes, beliefs and assumptions about
the interlocutor -- and the operation of psychological and physiological mechanisms involved in the
production of utterances.
This distinction is similar to Saussure's distinction between langue and parole . Both of them rest upon
the feasibility of separating what is linguistic from what is non-linguistic and subscribe to the fiction of
the homogeneity of the language-system.

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