PERFORMANCE GRAMMAR

John B. Carroll

"Towards a Performance Grammar of Core Sentences in Spoken and Written English," Journal of Structural Learning, 1975

• "This performance grammar thus far centers attention on language production; it is my belief that the problem of production must be dealt with before problems of reception and comprehension can properly be investigated.“

- (John Carroll, "Promoting Language Skills," in Perspectives on School Learning: Selected Writings of John B. Carroll, ed. by L. Anderson. Erlbaum, 1985)

• A description of the syntax of English as it is actually used by speakers in spontaneous dialoges.

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PERFORMANCE

•  term used in linguistic theory, and especially in generative grammar, to refer to language seen as a set of specific utterances produced by native-speakers, as encountered in a corpus; analogous to the Saussurean concept of parole

de Saussure’s Theory

• Parole is the actual utterances. • It is an external manifestation of

langue. It is the usage of the system, but not the system

La Langue

• It has a large number of elements whereby meaning is created by the arrangements between the elements and their consequent relationships.

• While learning a language, we master the system of grammar, spelling, syntax and punctuation (elements of langue).

Performance vs. competence

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• is opposed, in this sense, to the idealized conception of language known as competence

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• utterances of performance will contain features irrelevant to the abstract rule system

- hesitations - unfinished structures -arising from the various psychological and

social difficulties acting upon the speaker 

• e.g.

lapses of memory, or biological limitations, such as pauses being introduced through the need to breathe

These features must be discounted in a grammar of the language, which deals with the systematic process of sentence construction

POSSIBLE IMPLICATION OF THIS VIEW

• performance features are unimportant

• strongly criticized in recent years• factors which contribute

to performance grammars are now of considerable interest

Esp. in Psycholinguistics

 Linguistic Performance

• -the sentences that we actually produce--is limited by these factors. Furthermore, the sentences we actually produce often use the more simple grammatical constructions

• Our speech is full of false starts, hesitations, speech errors, and corrections. The actual ways in which we produce and understand sentences are also in the domain of performance.

Chomsky (1986)

• distinguished between externalised language (E-language) and internalised language (I-language)

E-language linguistics

• is about collecting samples of language and understanding their properties

• it is about describing the regularities of a language in the form of a gramma

 I-language linguistics

• is about what speakers know about their language

• For Chomsky, the primary aim of modern linguistics should be to specify I-language: it is to produce a grammar that describes our knowledge of the language, not the sentences we actually produce."

Linguistic performance 

Some of the factors which influence linguistic performance are:

(a) the linguistic competence or unconscious linguistic knowledge of the speaker-hearer,

• (b) the nature and limitations of the speaker-hearer's speech production and speech perception mechanisms,

• (c) the nature and limitations of the speaker-hearer's memory, concentration, attention and other mental capacities,

• (d) the social environment and status of the speaker-hearer,

• (e) the dialectal environment of the speaker-hearer,

• (f) the idiolect and individual style of speaking of the speaker-hearer,

• (g) the speaker-hearer's factual knowledge and view of the world in which he lives,

• (h) the speaker-hearer's state of health, his emotional state and other similar incidental circumstances.

Each of the factors mentioned is a variable in linguistic performance and, as such, may influence the nature and characteristics of a particular instance of linguistic performance and its product(s).

• http://grammar.about.com/od/pq/g/performancegrammarterm.htm

QUESTIONS? THANK YOU!

FRANCELLE CALUB