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49 CHOMSKY’S INFLUENCE
The ideal speaker-listener
Perhaps the most important statement about the idealisation of data is made in
a passage which has become famous or infamous (depending on one’s point of
view):
Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speakerlistener,
in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows
its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant
conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention
and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his
knowledge of the language in actual performance. (Chomsky 1965: 3)
This statement has been attacked on many sides, not least by variationist sociolinguists
who have pointed out the unnaturalness of a homogeneous speechcommunity,
and who have a built a whole branch of linguistics devoted to
examining precisely the lack of homogeneity in speech-communities. While it
would be preposterous to deny the value of the variationist programme, the
success of this branch of linguistics is not a criticism of Chomsky’s proposal in
the passage cited. Any syntactician who tried to write a grammar of standard
English so that it would account for the sentence How come is the Wellington gas
twice the price of the Hutt Valley’s? (heard on the radio) would be mocked as
much as a lexicographer who tried to list a word anenome meaning ‘anemone’
on the grounds that many people are heard to say that. We all make errors in
our production from time to time, and we would not expect any linguist to use
them as primary data for creating a theory of language. (Of course, speech
errors are sometimes used as evidence to support theories of how the mind
accesses stored material and manipulates linguistic strings, but that is a separate
matter.)
Competence and performance, I-language and E-language
Chomsky also distinguishes between the speakers’ actual knowledge of the language,
which is termed competence, and the use of that knowledge, which is
termed performance. The errors listed above are presumably performance
errors. Any piece of text (spoken or written) represents a performance of language,
which will match the speaker’s competence more or less inaccurately.
Thus performance is often taken as a poor guide to competence, but competence
is the object of study for the linguist.
As with so many of the claims Chomsky makes, this one has been the subject
of criticism, some focusing on the structured nature of variation within
performance and the correspondingly variable nature of competence, some