Competence, Linguistic

Literary/ Cultural Context Essay

John Phillips (National University of Singapore); Chrissie Tan (National University of Singapore)
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  • The Literary Encyclopedia. WORLD HISTORY AND IDEAS: A CROSS-CULTURAL VOLUME.

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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

competence

would 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 29 March 2024.]

208 Competence, Linguistic 2 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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