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THE LINGUISTICS STUDENT’S HANDBOOK 50
focusing on the performance as a body of evidence whose close analysis can lead
to a more sophisticated appreciation of how the speaker-listener’s competence
might be structured (the first of these criticisms comes from sociolinguists, the
second from corpus linguists and psycholinguists). It also seems that it can be
difficult to tell whether a particular phenomenon is best seen as a matter of
competence or a matter of performance, despite the apparently clear-cut division
between the two (see e.g. Bauer 2001: 29-32).
In later versions of Chomsky’s theory, the distinction between competence
and performance is replaced by the distinction between I-language and Elanguage.
I-language (and the I is deliberately ambiguous between ‘internalised’
and ‘intensional’ – and others add ‘individual’ and ‘idiolectal’ as well,
e.g. Lyons 1991: 170) corresponds more or less to the old competence. It is what
is held in the head of a single individual speaker-listener. E-language (where
the E stands for ‘externalised’ and ‘extensional’) is not like performance,
though. E-language includes languages viewed as a set of sentences, it includes
the material actually produced by a speaker, it includes ‘languages’ like French
and Mandarin, and it includes the objects of study of sociolinguistics and
corpus linguistics. Lyons (1991: 170, 193) calls this concept ‘ill-defined and
confusing’, and Chomsky himself (1991: 9) says that ‘it is doubtful that there
is such an entity’.
Generativism and transformationalism
Chomskyan grammar in the early days was regularly termed ‘generativetransformational’,
and while the label is less used today, the principles remain
unchanged.
The term ‘generate’ in generative is to be understood in a mathematical
sense, whereby the number one and the notion of addition can be used to generate
the set of integers or where 2 n can be used to generate the sequence 2, 4,
8, 16…. In linguistics a generative grammar is one which contains a series of
rules (see section 6) which simultaneously (a) confirm (or otherwise) that a particular
string of elements belongs to the set of strings compatible with the
grammar and (b) provide at least one grammatical description of the string (if
there is more than one description, the string is ambiguous) (see Lyons 1968:
156).
The first thing to notice about this is that a generative grammar is a formal
grammar. It is explicit about what is compatible with it. This is in direct contrast
to most pedagogical grammars, which leave a great deal of what is and is
not possible up to the intuition of the learner. In practice, this often leads to
disputes about how much the grammar is expected to account for. To use a
famous example of Chomsky’s (1957: 15), is Colourless green ideas sleep furiously
to be accepted as a sentence generated by the grammar, on a par with Fearless