Language is one of the main communicative tools that we use in everyday life to interact with one another. Communication is an inherent human need, and all humans have naturally developed and mastered a system for communicating with others in their daily interactions. Given that language is something that we acquire naturally and unconsciously since childhood, it may seem puzzling that it is the object of so many philosophical investigations. Yet the number of philosophers and linguists who have reflected upon the matter since the 20th century reveals its underlying complexity.
Acquiring the First Language
Do you remember when you learned your first language? You might have been too young to form your own memories, but your relatives could have told you stories about words that you used to mispronounce or mistakes that you used to make consistently. However, you likely turned out to be a fully proficient speaker of your first language(s), with no particular effort to learn new vocabulary or master grammar rules.
How is it that you can know so much about your mother tongue without having to explicitly learn it, as you did with your second language? The second language is any foreign language that you studied in school. By the same token, you can be proficient in several other languages, but still, it feels different when you speak in your mother tongue.
Excluding circumstances of abuse and deprivation or other exceptional cases, all children are naturally exposed to the language(s) spoken by the adults and other children around them and acquire such language(s) in a seemingly effortless manner. In traditional circumstances, being exposed to a language during childhood and being encouraged to use it as a communicative tool is sufficient for a child to acquire it fully, reaching complete fluency and native proficiency.
Now, think again about your first language, or your mother tongue. You are fully proficient in it, and you can use a vast range of minutely specific vocabulary. You can understand some of the expressions you have never heard before as long as they are formed according to the grammatical rules of your language, and you can clearly distinguish between a sound that is part of your language and one that is foreign to it. If you hear an unfamiliar word, you may likely be able to infer its meaning from context. This, however, doesn’t stop you from making any mistakes in daily communication.
Why Fluent Speakers Still Make Mistakes
You are trying to tell your friend to pass you the cork so you can open the bottle of red wine. You know the word for that object; you have used it multiple times. But, in this particular moment, the word is at the tip of your tongue, and you just can’t seem to recall it. You mumble something like “corr” to your friend, who is looking at you with confusion.
There is no doubt that you are a fully proficient user of your first language. However, it is quite unlikely that you could claim that you never make a mistake while using it. As in the example above, you might know the exact word used to refer to a particular object, but just as you are about to use it, you realize that it has escaped your mind, and therefore, you opt for a less suitable one.
You could exchange syllables of two consecutive words (bottle opener becoming open bottler), or you may mispronounce a word, due to overthinking, or because of the influence of a preceding or consecutive word. You could use the wrong verb tense or the wrong plural form of a noun. The list could go on forever, but the message is loud and clear.
Even fully proficient speakers of a language make several mistakes and use it inaccurately quite consistently. But should daily speech be deemed sufficient for casting a shadow over their language proficiency?
What Should Linguists Study?
It is quite unlikely that a speaker could be deemed unable to use their first language with absolute fluency despite the clear inaccuracies in their everyday speech. It can instead be argued that the actual linguistic competence of the speaker might not always correspond to their performance in language use.
The question that naturally arises is whether linguists should be concerned with speakers’ linguistic competence or performance. The answer to this question shapes many methodological decisions that linguists have to make in their research. Amongst linguists, philosophers, and logicians, most have approached the study of language in distinct ways.
A considerable number of theoretical linguists today analyze language as an abstract system of computation, described by what is commonly known as Universal Grammar – a concept developed by Noam Chomsky. We can call them Chomskyans. In their view, linguistics should be concerned solely with linguistic competence if it aims to be a methodologically serious scientific discipline. Performance, for them, is full of background noise, whereas competence is the true locus of one’s linguistic knowledge.
Others have rather explored language in its concrete public use, focusing on concrete communicative situations, social dynamics, and cultural context. We can call them usage-based theorists. On the other hand, in their view, performance is what yields true insight into linguistic knowledge.
The Competence vs. Performance Distinction
By now, you have probably got the impression that there is a sharp distinction between linguistic competence and performance. Competence is, by all means, an abstract concept, based on the premise that language is a computational system embedded in our minds and governed by rules. Such a system cannot be accessed directly by observing speakers’ behavior. Still, it must be reconstructed from their behavior and the knowledge of their mother tongue, also known as metalinguistic knowledge.
According to the Chomskyans, to clearly understand how the language faculty works out in our mind, one cannot dwell on idiolects (i.e., the particular language used by each individual), on slips of the tongue, or on phenomena of ongoing language variation, which would arise out of the language when used by the speakers. Mulling over such particulars would entail losing sight of the main goal of formal linguistic theory, which is to describe language systematically and at an adequate level of abstraction.
While taking into consideration the great variation that exists within the language used by different speakers and across multiple contexts makes the job of mapping the operations that govern the language faculty incredibly challenging, if not impossible. Looking at language performance is the only way to access and investigate the dynamics that govern language in its most concrete and natural shape.
Observing language performance can shed light on phenomena such as sociolinguistic variation, language change, code-switching, and phonological assimilation.
A Scientific Approach to Language
Which of the two approaches should we pick when deciding how to study the language? Both have advantages and disadvantages. Moreover, both approaches have fervent proponents in contemporary linguistics and philosophy of language, so the choice is far from obvious.
When considering linguistic competence, one has fewer variables to account for, increasing the likelihood of uncovering the rules of universal grammar. However, it may be objected that by observing only linguistic competence, one is not analyzing language in the form to which one has access through users, but rather a reconstructed and abstract version of the language that users do not actually produce. Hence, many researchers tend to question the authenticity of the investigations’ results, arguing that the data one must rely on does not match the actual language users can access.
On the other hand, approaching the study of language from a performance perspective allows one to deal with language as speakers use it. This allows for better observation of phenomena such as variations across individuals, communities, or social groups, and for investigation of the actual communicative tool in its most concrete and accessible form.
Nonetheless, we are still left with the question of what makes language so unique in the eyes of linguists and philosophers, and whether any individual methodological approach they adopt can lead us closer to answering it.
Balancing Competence and Performance
Rather than claiming one methodology is objectively superior, viewing the study of language through the competence vs. performance dichotomy is often more effective when tailored to the specific goals of the research.
The extensive detail found in linguistic performance data can often impede or restrict research focused on building a system to explain how language functions. This data, in fact, usually features inaccuracies that are part of a single speech production but are not core to the language system being analyzed. Hence, they would be of little use, or rather an obstacle to the work of a linguist who is trying to develop a system to describe the functioning of language.
By contrast, the work of a researcher interested in how social aspects affect language use, how language changes over time, or how a community pronounces a sound or uses a lexical item would have little reason to construct an abstract version of the language that is free of variation. Instead, they would benefit from such variations as they consist of the object of the investigation itself.
As a result, for a study of language to be as accurate and balanced as possible, it would have to be informed by both language competence and language performance, in the amount required by the specific research question. Some investigations require a great deal of focus on how language is used. In contrast, others require greater attention to the abstract language system rather than to the details of idiolects and single performances.
